However, this thread highlights a fundamental property of a networked life: privacy is dead, there is only identity management.
You only need whois and google/facebook to find the data in this case. Both are instances of seemingly disconnected and "local" data points (as in nobody without a real interest would ever look for these things), which, chained, intersected, etc. can reveal a ton of information about a person, all of which was volunteered by the person in question.
The NYT had a piece on "human-flesh search" recently, and 4chan raids have been well-known for a while. The point being, that once you release something in the wild, it's there, and accessible. Ethically, is it fair game to mine it (like people search engines, for example, do)?
It should give us collective pause to think - why do we get all those web services like facebook, gmail, twitter, etc. for free? Without even noticing it we are whoring out our privacy and intimate patterns. Google has two customer groups: users and advertisers - and advertisers bring in the money, users are there to maximize advertiser and google ROI - e.g. Google allows pure-ad parked pages, they give tips on "blending" ads to increase CTRs etc.
If harnessed properly, these things can be useful, but it requires a mindset and workflow not entirely dissimilar to those of spies or high-end criminals - controlling information by selective disclosure, identity segmentation, disinformation, anonymization, etc. - not for sinister purposes, mind you, but simply to guard what we traditionally call privacy.
written with a one time account