USA TODAY -- Apr 14 -- A growing amount of free personal information
is so easy to find online that many Internet regulars don't think of it
as spying. Plug a name into Google and you have an instant background
check of your best friend, your brother-in-law or that guy or gal you
met last night at a bar. "You can bug people the way spy agencies
used to do 20 years ago - really cheap now," says Howard Rheingold,
author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. But now,
idle curiosity prompts many Net users to nonchalantly do "soft
surveillance" - plugging a name into a search engine to see what turns
up. "Everyone does it," says James Hong of San Francisco, founder of
online dating and photo-rating Web site Hot or Not. "I do it on new
employees; I do it if I meet a cute girl, and I want to know more.
Maybe I'm crazy, but who doesn't do it?" FULL ARTICLE @ YAHOO