These days, we display personal information so freely online that stalkers have all the information they need at their fingertips – free of charge.

Let’s use a random, obvious target in this post.

Today, I went to eat at Killiney Kopitiam and I saw this Ronald McDonald mascot parading around at POMO. There was a huge crowd and some sort of McDonald’s promotion seems to be going on. There was even a performance going on. Halfway through the performance, someone from the crowd shouts “YAY TONY LEE!” and the chant goes on.

I find Ronald MacDonald cute, so I go home and try to google this mysterious guy. I key in “Ronald MacDonald+mascot+POMO+tony lee”.

Facebook seems to be one of the first few items to show up whenever there is a name. If I were to do a search a few days later, I might come up with several blog articles and features on the McDonald event. From Facebook, I can actually see how Tony Lee looks like – he’s from NAFA, he is single, he is 24 years old, he likes to eat McGriddles, and the recent survey he’d taken shows that he has a personality closer to Sasuke in Naruto.

Due to his nature of being an IT student, he has coincidentally subscribed to multiple social networking sites, one of them happens to be www.brightkite.com.

And now… I actually know that at this very moment, he is in the office of Wilkie Edge. That’s about just one street away from where I am now. The people around him is a girl named Susan, a geek called Lim Hui, and oh, he just twittered on facebook “ate laksa. found cockroach in it. YUCKS.”

It is all so very easy for me to hunt down anyone who thinks internet is a safe place to display all your public information. With just a click. Sure enough, there are always options to hide your particulars; softwares to manage your public profile – but as my friend said, nothing is ever private if it’s online. There will always be ways to get around security. And as soon as you think you have outsmarted the system, new programmes will always find new ways to turn the tables on you again.

By the way, Tony Lee is a fictional character. Any resemblance or whatsoever is purely coincidental.