So I’m bored and sitting in the Denver airport with my flight delayed and I’m hours away from missing valentines day. Luckily I was able to find an article on Wired that teaches you how to use Flickr to “stalk” your future sweetheart .

A few weeks later, a friend of the mystery girl clicked on a link to photos tagged with “Harajuku” and stumbled upon the photo and also a picture of Matt. Though Mystery Girl’s back is turned in the picture, the friend recognized her shoulder tattoo. He sent her the link to that photo and to Matt’s pic. The mystery girl was in fact CherryVega, another Flickr user living in England. Cherry posted a comment underneath Matt’s fateful photo with a link to the picture she was taking at the time. Three months later, Matt was on his way to London to meet Cherry in person. They fell in love, and the rest is Flickr history.

Ok I’m all for the awesomeness of social networking and making new friends over the “inter-tubes” but this article freaks me out. I’ve had a number of friend in the past who have actually had real life stalkers and it is really not fun. The scary part comes when you start to look at the information people will leave in their profiles and attach to their pictures. It’s pretty easy to find a profile that references a personal website or blog. Many times those personal URLS give away a lot of information. Do a WHOIS on the majority of domains and you can usually figure out the owners home address in seconds. Beyond home address I’m willing to bet you even find their home phone number the vast majority of the time. For gawd sake, please make sure you are using a domain anonymizer or at least faking the personally identifiable information.

We live in an age of information insecurity and people need to be aware of their actions when it comes to putting yourself out on the internet. This is yet another reason why I’ll take my time with jumping head first into stuff like Facebook.