Pipl.com a new search engine for "People Search" has gained some attention in a few blogs (e.g. styropor.ch). Not because they are specialised in searching information related to people in the web, this is well known from other People Search Engines like Yasni.com or Spock.
But the really new thing about Pipl is, that it searches also sources from the deep web. For example can you search for an ICQ-Nickname and you will probably find your own old identity, that you nearly had forgotten about. And there are some other nice features I like about this search engine. It has fields to search for email-addresses, username and also for phone number (but only for the US now).
A short test has shown, that the results are really good. And i therefore like it more than Spock or Yasni.
But what scares most users is, that there is now one search engine, uncovering all the information leaks in the management of somebody's digital identity management. I have written a post about this topic as well.
Now there are two things you can do: First you can go on as usual and leaving your "digital DNS" carelessly everywhere in the web. This means, giving away a lot of information about yourself and retrieve a lot of information from the web. But only one mistake can have a tremendous effect, maybe not now, but sometimes later in your life. One bad picture of you (i.e. on which you behave inappropriate) may ruin your career. Because one thing is clear, such People Search Engine do not come up so fast because only we as private users want to now something about our neighbour, but also the companies want to know about their employees. So I would suggest that this is not the best solution.
The second thing you can do is to set up a strict digital identity management for yourself. This means, before you post something out into the net and loose every control over it, ask yourself if you would like your boss (or another authority person in your life) to know about the piece of information on discussion. If you think it is better to keep this private or you want to have some control over this information, do not post it. Call your friend and tell them on the phone or directly.
The latter illustrated situation is maybe somewhat exaggerated, but what I want to say with this is, that you should be careful with the information that you spread in the internet. As Bruce Schneier has written in his essy Lessons From The Facebook Riots : Whenever you put data on a computer, you lose some control over it. And when you put it on the internet, you lose a lot of control over it.
An additional side-effect, that a good digital identity management, in the style I have described above, has, is that you have automatically a better profile of yourself on the internet. The quality of information about you enhances and this will certainly be appreciated from the other users.
Hallo Pascal, "good digital identity management" wird wohl immer wichtiger werden ;-)