Quitting The Day Job

Aninimity on the Internet

If you think no one can ever find out information about you from the internet, you are sadly mistaken.  I not even talking about people just googling you to figure out a few details about yourself. I am talking about people knowing pretty much everything about you.

Story

I received an email from an affiliate company stating they would like me to apply for their company because they have some offers they think I would like to push.  Ok, not a big deal, as I have applied to a lot of companies, and they could have gotten my email address in a variety of different ways.  But no, it was not that straight forward.  I finally checked my voice mail on my cell after seeing I had 10 messages (8 of them from headhunters), and to my surprise was a continuance of the email.

Apparently the affiliate company saw one of my comments on a blog that I frequent.  They then (and this is all assumption, but probably 100% true) did a who is lookup on this website to find my name, address, email, and phone number.  Now, I was going to use who is protection on this domain as I did not want my current company to find out, but after this, I don’t think I will.

I didn’t mind getting the email, in fact, I am currently applying for the affiliate company.  While this kind of communication is nice to get, there are plenty of other emails you don’t want to get like cease and desist letters.  Look soon for a followup to this post about the pros and cons of private registration on your domains, as well as using your own name for branding.