Yesterday my wife received a call from a young woman looking for “Matt” from an unfamiliar number. When she was told that Matt was not there, she seemed disappointed.

Well, I had no idea who might be calling me at 8:30 on a Thursday morning, and my curiosity was peaked. We had the phone number, so I could have called back and found out what was up, but instead I took the following route and was quite surprised at what I was able to find.

1. Reverse lookup: I wasn’t able to find the name of the caller, but I did find out that she called from a cellphone, and I was able to determine her mobile carrier.
2. *67 Callback: blocks your number when calling the person, just in case I didn’t want the person to know it was me calling back. This low tech approach got me to the voice mail which gave me a first name of the caller.
3. Google.com: This is where it gets interesting. I had a phone number and a first name. Ok, lets put both into trusty Google.
   Result: I found a university housing page listing the number I searched for and full name of the person, and street address. Now I’m curious as to what more is out there.
4. University Site: Ok, search the name.
   Result: Well, now I know what program she is in, and look here, and athlete too, with a link to a player profile. A wealth of information here: Home town, birth date, current university year, picture. Enough? One last step…
5. Facebook: person search, yes that’s her…I know from the picture from the last search. While I don’t have access to her profile, I can see her friends names, and based on the surnames, the names of a number of her family members.

Now, I want to stress here that I am not a strange internet stalker, but from the phonecall my curiosity was peaked, and then through the process of the search I was really intrigued, not so much about the person, but at the shocking amount of info I could find given a few minutes.

Info summary:

• First Name, Surname
• Age
• Date of birth
• Address
• School
• Cell provider
• Univeristy program
• Athletic history and activities
• Home town
• Friends names
• Family members
• Picture

All from…a phone number on a call display, and commonly available, legal, internet searches. No hacking or subversive methods involved. It took about 5-10 minutes. Think about it. How much do people know about you?

And in case you were wondering…no, I don’t know the person.
It must have been a wrong number.