Is your boss Googling you?

Almost one in four Net surfers has searched online for information about someone at work or a business contact, according to a new survey released Thursday.

The survey, conducted by Harris Interactive for search engine Dogpile, said about 23 percent of adult Internet users in the United States have searched online for their clients or customers, workers or potential employees, and supervisors or prospective managers.

Reasons for the searches vary. While curiosity was the most common reason for searches on co-workers, some people looked up clients and customers to get prosaic information such as an address or phone number.

Nearly 52 percent of those surveyed who looked up employees and potential workers said curiosity was the primary reason behind their search. Around 63 percent cited similar reasons for searching for supervisors or potential managers. The study found that men are more likely to do such searches than women.

Internet searches have become more and more detailed, making it easier to find information, but also prompting privacy concerns among some industry watchers.

Harris Interactive polled 2,266 people for the survey between Sept. 28 and Sept. 30.

[Razzl]

Get your number unlisted

This would be a good place to point out that the most concrete step you can take to protect yourself from random snooping and possibly spamming is to pay the extra couple of bucks a month to get your phone number unlisted. It turns out that under the phone deregulation schemes of the 90's any entity calling itself a phone company is entitled to buy the customer database from the real poles-and-wire phone companies. Most of the search engine people search functions are created from these bought phone lists, as well as those "alternative" yellow pages books. When you drop off of one, you drop off of all--they're all getting at you from the same source. It won't make you invisible to the web if you're involved in other things, but at least a lot of your personal information isn't dead simple to get at for free.