I feel dirty

I've been called creepy by a lot of people, much more than ever recently. I shrugged it off or downplayed it as some quirk. Some found it dorky and amusing, others found it slightly disturbing and not easy to settle with.

But just now, I have done something that made me realize that I am heading down a creepy road that I have never wanted to travel.

The internet is a wonderful thing that connects people with each other. You can go on websites like MySpace or Facebook, or whatever, with nothing but a first and last name of a person you are looking for and basically find them. Or just plop their name into an internet search engine, sometimes with a little more information such as where they are from, and bingo! you find something on them.

This is very dangerous. Especially if you are slightly obsessed and stalker-ish. I am guilty of doing such things.

There are a couple of people, women, who I have talked to in the past and lost contact with. Well it was more, they stopped popping up online, or mysteriously disappeared.

One example is a lady I met on an internet dating site. We talked and chatted via email, until she trusted me enough to give me her phone number. Things were going well until I said something that....well, creeped her out a bit. Looking back, maybe I was too quick to say what I said, too early for her to realize it was a joke. This happened right before I lost my phone. But I wanted to apologize. I tried sending her an email...invalid address. One would think "hey, might as well leave well enough alone, just move ahead", but sadly, not me. I figured out how to text someone via my email address, so I went into my phone records, looked up her number, and then went ahead and offered an apology. No response. Once again, "let it go" popped into my head, and I listened for a moment. But then saw her pop up on the site again under a new account. Of course, I took advantage of the fact that she did not make her profile private to members, and logged off my profile, so that I wouldn't show up under those who viewed her profile, and viewed the profile to confirm it was her.

Very creepy. Yes. But it does not end there.

Everyone has a facebook or myspace page. Any old Joe on the internet could just visit a site, type in a name and location, and pop up someone's profile. Before, myspace had it so that you needed to log into the site before you could look at a person's pictures, and of course, I knew a way to circumvent that, but recently, they made pictures on all public profiles viewable to everyone. I did not do the myspace thing with this person, but have done it with others. It makes me feel disgusted a bit.

Facebook, on the other hand, is not so lenient when it comes to viewing other folk's pictures, thankfully, to keep creepers like me away, but I am sure there is a way to circumvent that, I haven't found out yet (thankfully). So, although I had only a first name, and location, it wasn't enough to do an internet search on her. But, she made the mistake of sending me a photo of herself from facebook. This was before I had gotten one myself. When I did get a facebook account recently, I learned of a way to find someone's account just by finding that person's profile number in the url of the picture. I did this, and it directed me to a person with a different name.
Didn't look like the chick I was talking to. Maybe she is a friend. So I clicked on friends, sifted through a couple pages and found the person I was looking for.

First and last name. Add that in with where she is from, and Google will sing to me, giving a bit more information about her. I now know where she graduated high school, her whole first name, but stopped myself when I was going to do a background check on her. I would have to pay a couple bucks to do that, but I realized that it was a final boundary that kept me from doing something serious. Almost illegal, if not illegal.

I realized I had a problem. May be nothing serious, but still it could very well lead to something worse. It's absolutely not fair to the people I have done it to. I certainly pass it off under the guise of research.


So if there is anything to come from this in the early stages, I would say that it is not the best idea to put anything out there with a lot of personal information on it. That is why everything about myself on the Internet, which isn't much, is under an alternate name or handle. That is why I do not use my real name on Facebook or any other site. Because if it is easy for me to gather so much, who's to say that other people aren't doing it, and have no qualms about paying a little cash for your personal information. I am marginally better than those folks, but that does not exonerate me from what I have done. It's not creepy for the intent to be funny, it's just plain obsessive.


So, I guess I have a New Year's Resolution now.