Data Mining

You know going back to when I did my masters, one of the subjects I did was data warehousing and data mining on a large scale data systems. Well as you know Google is the quintessential data warehouse. We can get anything we need from Google. Not unless you've managed to keep yourself away from the Internet. Data mining are specific methods for obtaining specific data.
Data mining has improved and now it looks like you can data mine the Internet for specific information about people. The obvious pro is you can find out about people, you've lost contact with. The obvious con is you can find out about people and use that information against them. Whether this is for an interview, research or just plain old stalking.

Have a look at paterva! This online tool does a search of many data sets including social networks (e.g. myspace, facebook) and the Internet to find out information about an entity. I say entity, more than likely it will be used and abused to find out more people. But then again this could my warped stalker mind.