Our personal info online

With all the news about identity theft of late, there has been "a flurry of hype over ZabaSearch.com," CNET reports. The article provides some helpful perspective, saying that ZabaSearch is one of zillions of personal-information search sites (Google turns up some 300 million). It's "no evil Big Brother. It's a search aggregator, and a rather efficient one at that. All the information in its database can be found elsewhere on the Web." It's all public information (which - at first check - means that minors' information doesn't turn up, thankfully). I guess there's small comfort in that only one's birthdate, address, and phone number turn up - you have to pay for background check info! The article's writer, Tom Merritt, points out that ZabaSearch will remove your information but - somewhat shadily - requires even more details to do so. The main point is, though, that you'd really have to go to the sources to get personal info off the Web, and he tells you how. This is another one of those Internet reality checks; convenience has a definite downside. If you read down far enough in the CNET piece, you'll get to a link to another very informative article about "Identity theft remedies in the works," which I'm linking to here in case you don't get that far.