Cyber Stalking

This week, I picked up a book at the library. It's just been published and is in high demand right now, so the copies are circulating quickly between all the branches. Inside my copy, I found a bunch of receipts from whom I am assuming was the previous person to have it checked out. I quickly glanced at them inside the library, and was immediately intrigued. This could give me a little glance into the places this book had recently gone. While a book that I purchase new at Barnes and Noble has a fairly boring life, going from the bookstore to live on my shelf for probably a long time, a library book has a much more adventursome time of it, jaunting about from here to there, going on vacation or to the doctor's waiting room with someone. Especially a book that lots of people want to read. I thought of People of the Book and wanted to construct a story around this book.

But, then I got home and started googling and got totally freaked out about what I could find out about this person and his family in a matter of a few short minutes.

Mark left 5 or so receipts in this book. One was from the airport and then there were a few in Spanish. It turns out this man had been on a trip to Mexico. At first I thought that he had gone on vacation with his family, but examination of the dates showed that it was a short trip, taking only a couple of days. The receipts were mostly standard: there's one from Applebee's in Morelio (seriously, you're going to eat at Applebee's when you're in Mexico?!?) with the card number information mostly x-ed out and no real identifying information about the person. But, the kicker was a receipt from an unknown company. Maybe Mark was buying some pottery or something else to take home. The dealer took a print of his credit card, complete with his number and his name. A local phone number was also scrawled on the receipt.

And from there, I started my search. I typed in Mark's name, and immediately got quite a few hits. I found his job information on a professional networking site, and found out that in his job at Big Company, he is a Director of Sales and Latin America Marketing. Aha! It was a business trip. I got his results from a 5k run he did last year. This also told me his age (44) and his residential location (Edina). I'd already made the assumption that he lived in Edina, since the due date slip, also left inside, was from the Edina branch. And, along with his race results? I got the results for his wife and two daughters. He and his 11-year old daughter Grace ran and completed the race together, and his wife (42 years old) and 13 year old daughter Madeline, faster runners, completed the race together.

From there, I googled his family members. His wife is a competitive racer. I found her results for many races, including a marathon.

I assume they have a grayhound, because I found her name in a special hound newsletter.

I found the name of the private school that the girls attend, as well as some of Madeline's extracurricular activities. I saw a photo of Madeline snowboarding.

I also saw a photo of Mark at a black tie charity event.

So, now I have a picture of the person who previously had this book checked out. And I have a remarkable amount of information about him and his family. I'm sure that if I wanted to, I could find his address.

One key to my ability to gather all this information about him is that Mark has an unusual last night and I could zoom in to his personal information easily, without having to sift through extraneous web pages. Still, it really creeped me out. I felt like a cyber-stalker. And if someone was doing something similar to me and I knew about it, I would really be freaked out. I immediately typed in my daughter's name, but didn't get any hits. She's only 6. Then I typed in my name to see what popped up. It was just a bunch of academic stuff from papers and conferences--nothing too personal.

I thought about calling him to see if he needed his receipts back, but that is kind of creepy too. Instead, I think I will just throw them out.