That made me think of this article I saw on Verily about date stalking. Admittedly the GIFs are my favorite part, but it's interesting nonetheless.
I don’t know many single woman who can resist the temptation to do a quick Google search on their dates. You have his last name, maybe even his place of work. That’s all the information you need to conduct a full-blown investigation. Of course, you soon find out that Google stalking is a rabbit hole and once you get started that way, you can never come back. But more importantly, information learned can never be unlearned, which can make the preliminary small talk one big, awkward charade to say the least.
The best way to skip the farce, is to ask a friend to do a quick background check if the guy is a stranger. Otherwise, patiently wait to find out all your burning questions in person. But, since we all know that kind of discipline is superhuman, here are four things you must do after you decided to Google stalk your date.
01. PRACTICE YOUR SURPRISED FACE.
You should just practice this anyway as a good surprised face can be a lifesaver in a pinch.
02. ASK THE QUESTION YOU ALREADY KNOW FIRST.
The sooner you know the "unknown" you can drop the act and just get to know the poor guy.
03. GIVE HIM THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT.
Not everything on the internet is true, and news media doesn't always tell the full story. I hope this doesn't come as a surprise to you. Don't assume that you know his whole life story—unless his Facebook page isn't private, then yeah, you do.
04. PREPARE TO LET IT SLIP.
It's bound to happen, maybe on the first date, maybe a couple dates later. But whatever you do, don't lie about it. Own up to it and remind him that it's a compliment that he made you curious and crazy enough to stalk him.
What do you think? Stalk or no stalk before a first date?
~ Katie
Song of the Day: Dark Blue by Jack's Mannequin popped up on Pandora this morning. The music video is a little odd, but I really like the song.
So just to experiment, I googled a few friends. All I could find is 1) LinkedIn profiles, 2) an occasional work website, and 3) very few personal/business websites. Of course my academic friends all have lots of info online, but that seems like a small group of people. I guess I always thought googling was about figuring out if they were wanted or something. Maybe if they have a twitter or instagram you'd find out a lot, but otherwise what's the point?
ReplyDeleteI think a lot of it depends on what you have made public. If someone Googled me, you can find my address and home phone # on Whitepage.com (kinda creepy), my LinkedIn account, Etsy, posts by my boss on his Legislative website (which would lead you to being able to find my office), my Google+ account and if you wander on to the second page, that I attended a Lancaster County GOP Pancake Breakfast last November. My Facebook shows little on my public profile and I have my Instagram account set to private, so you wouldn't learn much from those two mediums.
DeleteOther people have a wealth of knowledge about themselves on the internet, such as a gentleman I was tying to track down in May of last year (I included a link to a post about it below). Info I didn't include in that post was a couple of articles about him that were...let's say, less that exemplary, but since they were public knowledge (newspaper articles), once I had his name, I ran across them pretty quickly.
Technology is an amazing thing...
http://calkate21.blogspot.com/2015/05/technology-is-amazing-thing.html
Sometimes it doesn't even have to be something YOU posted that gets tracked down. An old friend from college got married in June to a friend of mine's little sister and in trying to find wedding pictures, I stumbled across my ex's mom's FB page, which is set to public. Found out he's dating again...she's cute and they look happy, so that's good...but I'd never have run across it if his mom hadn't posted pictures and not tagged them (If they were tagged, I wouldn't have seen them, since I have the ex blocked on FB). So if you're willing to dig enough (or randomly run across it), you have the potential of finding out a lot about someone.
Wow! Yeah, I suppose if other people you know leave their social media somewhat open, someone could find out quite a bit about you. I try to put certain parts of myself out there in very obvious places (levirussell.com is my website) while hiding other things. Not always easy.
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