How private is your personal information? As someone who spends some time with SEO and search engines, I’d venture to propose that it’s not as private as you think. The following are ways of finding public and personal information through Google. I encourage you to try these with your own name and hope that it will help you better-secure your identity.
Criminal Records
Your state + “department of corrections” + name
Your state + “death row” + name
E-mail Addresses
The Pipe Character
This searches for variations of a name (Jacob, in this example). The pipe character is near the backslash “\” on your keyboard and is universally recognized as meaning “OR” in nerdy programming circles.
Google Profile Listings:
site:http://gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/
This search reveals Google’s sitemaps of every Google Profile. I’m surprised that they have even allowed these listings to be indexed in the first place, because there are thousands of them.
Credit Card Numbers:
4052000000000000..4052999999999999
Hackers know that credit card account numbers are typically 16 digits long. They also know that the first four digits in a card’s number tell a lot about the type of card, as lots of cards that share the same first four digits. For example, if a card starts with 4052, a hacker would simply enter 4052000000000000..4052999999999999 into the Google search engine. This tells Google to search for Web sites containing any 16-digit number starting with 4052.
This is actually one of the few searches that I know of that are blocked by Google. There are other ways, however, to find credit card numbers in Google by finding footprints that payment processing systems with security holes leave behind. A startup called Blippy found this out the hard way recently.
Voicemail Messages
This isn’t available anymore, but for a short time in late 2009 Google was mistakenly indexing their Google Voice customers’ voicemails. You could find them simply by searching for site:https://www.google.com/voice/fm/*.
For a more comprehensive, advanced guide to Google’s operators, see:
http://www.google.com/cse/docs/resultsxml.html
For a guide to Google hacking, see:
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