No, I am not about to reveal some deeply personal bit of trivia that should have stayed personal, don’t worry. 
As I was coming in the door from work, the phone was ringing and I had to run to answer it (OK, actually I had to run to find the handset, because I always leave it laying somewhere obscure) in time. It was from what looked like a legal firm in a 919 area code, and the woman on the phone asked for a familiar-sounding man’s name. I told her she had the wrong number and she apologized and hung up. Of course I immediately googled the number…
The number was indeed for a legal firm, one that appears to specialize in collections, and I also remembered why the name sounded familiar. It was the boyfriend of the previous tenant in our house. A moment of confusion followed: how did they get our phone number to try and reach someone who previously had our address? The ‘why’ I could easily see; someone putting the phone in another person’s name to dodge creditors is a pretty common scenario, but I was baffled as to how our number came into it.
At first, I figured it must be some special reverse search software that creditors and people like that have access to, but the truth is actually more disturbing. It took a quick google on “lookup phone number by address,” and then a few mouse clicks, for me to bring up the name and address our phone number is listed under. Even scarier, for a fee the site would also give previous address history, court cases, email addresses, and all sorts of other info on any individual searched.
To have this sort of information out there on the Internet, for anyone to access, is rather disturbing.
