David Nichols: This isn’t really a comment on the article itself, but I’ve always wondered why so many people are concerned about online privacy such as this. Social numbers, credit cards, and the like I can understand, but why would you want to hide things like your contact information, etc. from people when online? We use tools like Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, and blogging so that people can find us and so that we can communicate with them. Why then do people have this double standard with their personal information?

Most people are frustrated that they didn’t know the information was there in the first place. The funny thing about this is that they are informed upon signing up that we reserve the right to publish their information.

Also, for students not living on campus, people search would reveal their local address. In some cases that meant their home address, which bothered a lot of people.

One person working at Web & New Media commented that his ex stalked him through the people search, and he was elated to be able to remove the information now. Putting a FERPA hold just to stop it from being there is overkill in most situations, so they had no alternative.

The chief difference between people search and facebook is this, David: People can’t control what goes into people search. You can say you live in Finland on your facebook profile if you want to, there’s something about them “losing control over their information” that they hate, not necessarily what’s shown.

Hope that helps to answer your question.