Friday, January 13, 2006

Cheap Information!

As they say, seeing is believing. When I saw the story on CNN this evening, I was almost tempted to believe, oh this cant be true! But looking over the website - it does not seem that improbable - although I am really clueless about how do they do it.

Okay, here is the deal. If you pay these guys a measly $110, they can apparently give you call log of any person. And if you don't know the person's cell phone number, its just another $95. That's how cheap your and mine privacy is. You wont worry if law enforcement agencies could do this - but seeing any random people getting access to that much data within a few mouse clicks is alarming enough.

I remember when I started chatting with random people, one surefire way to check authenticity of their information was to go to Calcutta Telephone's sites and quickly do a reverse look up - seeing if the address and the last name matches with the phone number given. It became all the more easy after I came in here , a simple people search in the university's portal was enough to convince me if that girl is not actually studying computer science in University of Nebraska or which is more probable, if she is faking her name. And it gave me an immense sense of power to see that I can access that kind of information without even moving from my desk. So I guess this is the next logical progress - only thing is it no longer remains child's play. One can spy on ones spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend , employees can track employer's every move , in short ones life becomes an open book. And all this without the person getting the slightest hint of suspicion!

And in case you are interested , here is locatecell.

P.S - Birthday wishes to my sister Nandini (11th January) and Saiti (17th January).

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