Reporter’s guide to finding people

Duff Wilson of the Seattle Times has a nifty guide on how to find information on people: “Who is John Doe, and where to get the paper on him“. It’s missing a lot of commercial services, but it’s still interesting.

Of course, this raises the thorny issue of whether it’s OK that all these data exist. After seeing what’s happened to Jack Ryan , and what’s now happening with John Kerry’s divorce records, it’s sobering to think of the trail of breadcrumbs that we all inevitably leave in the public record. I was a little surprised to see that Wilson’s list omitted search engines like Google, which can often turn up interesting tidbits about people, but maybe he assumes that everyone knows that already.