[Dion]

What makes these sites controversial is that they gather all this information without your permission. The resulting profiles can be embarrassing or simply wrong. And getting those profiles removed or changed can be impossible.

http://www.time.com/time/business/ar...id=feed-biz_ad

An estimated 30% of all Web searches are aimed at finding people, according to industry statistics, and upstarts like PeekYou, Pipl, Spock, and Wink are vying for a piece of this potentially huge market. These free sites work by scouring the Web for any virtual footprints you might have on MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Yahoo!, Flickr and elsewhere, and then creating a fresh profile that organizes all that information on one page.

When Nazira Sacasa sent me a press release for a new clothing boutique late last month, she didn't know that I would launch a full-scale web search to learn everything I could about her. But I needed a victim to test out the new breed of people-search services on the web, and a paid publicity seeker seemed like fair game. And so, after just a few minutes of clicking around, I had found Sacasa's MySpace page, her age, home address and what appears to be quite a lot of information about her family in Florida — all without using Google or any other popular search site.