123People.com - Find All About that Special Someone

123 People is a people search engine which takes on stalkerish proportions. Type in any name and 123 will pull up contact information—phone numbers, email addresses, images, and any media available, i.e. videos, profiles, tags, and weblinks. If you’ve got videos on Youtube, a LinkedIn profile, a Wiki article, even a Facebook or Google account, 123 People will find it. It’s quite useful actually for detecting a person’s web presence. If you’re a registered user, you can interact more with the site. You may add tags, ratings and comments to existing profiles; you can also build your own profile and put limits as to how much people can actually add to your profile. Searches can be focused on tags or people in Switzerland, the US, the UK, Germany and Austria more specifically, or the world in general. Registration is free.

“123people is a people search engine that looks into nearly every corner of the Web to help you find information on everyone you (want to) know. Using our proprietary search algorithm, you can find comprehensive and centralized people profiles consisting of images, videos, phone numbers, email addresses, social networking and Wikipedia profiles and much more. All of this rich media profile content is pulled from an extensive list of international sources like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, YouTube and Wikipedia.

We’re working on something bigger than just building a virtual directory, throwing aggregated people profiles at you. So, we developed tools for you to contribute to the profile content we find. We’re adding new dimension to search and people search by including tagging, commenting and sharing capability alongside profiles.”

123 People does a good job at compiling relevant information. It finds and pulls up info from social networks and public directories, from web articles and even online petitions. The results are neatly displayed by category.

I imagine there are some privacy issues at risk here. How safe is this? Are people notified if their profile is edited without their knowledge?