Do you worry about security?

I think my grandchildrens' parents are too slack. My 3yo grandson has an email address which I think is cool, and he's had a variety of websites. His mother has never settled on one she likes so she keeps trying more and more. It bothers me that a predator might find his pictures and target him. Do you worry about this?

No honestly I do not. Both my children's fathers are as much geek as I am. I used to find missing people for a living, and we all monitor kiddos online (as we will be the ones setting up their computers). I think if more families were knowledgeable about things online, we would not have all the stories about online predators that we do now. Things could be controlled better, AND I don't mean just parents, I mean the government too. :D

How did you go about locating missing people? That's a very interesting career I think. What were the first things you normally did and what was most effective?

It had started with someone I dated in high school for 3 yrs, I had moved to another state and wanted to find my family I lost contact with back in my home state. It took sometime, but with a good many free sites online (sadly not now updated as good as they were before), I ended up finding my sisters address first, that lead me to knowing my father still would frequent the American Legion he spent most of my childhood at.

If you don't know the AL, is a members only for vets/service people/direct family/etc. So I walked in the members section after being buzzed in at the door, and said if I give you a name can you give me an address, oddly, THEY DID, and then I told him thats its not nice to give out peoples info like that when you don't know who you are talking too - then I added that I was his daughter.

For most of the main work we did, when the free sites started to lag, we ended up purchasing the same type of software that police/detectives use/etc (like when you get pulled over by a cop, they run your name thru NCIC, which is the same type of things I used back in the day). :)

You should have told them you were a internal security investigator and they FAILED. *snort*

That's really interesting. Is NCIC available to the general public for purchase?

I missed all the interesting stuff!!!! That sounds like a very interesting job. My only worry is my photos being used without my permission. You can watermark them or just don't make them publically viewable.

This thread, I find very interesting. I really like the idea of finding people, I am in the process of doing my family tree, trying to trace back to at least the last 5 generations.

In relation to security, sometimes I wonder about even my security on the net.