Privacy on the Internet

I received a phone call yesterday from register.com and I realized then that I had updated my contact information on my account. I did this because I had used my mother's name and listed her business address and an old phone number.

For a few years now, register.com would not have been able to reach me, mainly because my mother is deceased and her business was sold and the building leveled. But now that I updated my phone number, why not, right? After all, I did just add another domain and removed the private listing cost and email account cost that was so eloquently folded into the total cost in my shopping cart. tsk, tsk.

On to this privacy matter.

I've managed to keep the number of stalkers that are coming after me for any number of reasons to a bare minimum, let's say um, 0. So the register.com representative explains to me that this information about me is published for anyone to lookup in the whois database.

*gasp!!*

Well, duh...if you have a presence on the internet, isn't it likely that you WANT people to find you? Or if they find you on the internet and are excited about your product and want to give you money for it (Lord forbid)...do you then want to hide any means of contact they may obtain in order to reach you and make further inquiries about your product?

If this information is so readily available, why is it that every website on the internet has to have "contact us" and "about us" pages filled with information such as address, phone number and email? Oh look! Now they have maps showing people how to find you! Scary, isn't it?

And what about your picture? On the internet?! What?!

My feeling on all this is that whatever you're exposed to when you walk out of your house and into the public eye, it's no different on the internet. You don't go to the grocery store with a bag over your face, do you? So why would you be on the internet without a picture, doofus? Unless, of course, you have something to hide. In which case I wouldn't want to have anything to do with you anyway, since you're that shady. :)