athloi's Journal: Gaping privacy hole in whitepages.com

I try not to be a skittish, paranoid consumer, although the way people are motivated by money and have no souls makes me paranoid (apologies to Thomas Pynchon, natch). However, whitepages.com has added a neat feature that piques my paranoia. It reveals the frequency of searches for first names, and the first and last name and location of the person most recently searched for -- I can't put a finger on why this is a bad idea, but like domain slammers watching whois results, it opens people up to predation. Here is an example of a first name search, and here is an example of a last name search.