NW stock contest 2004 Now through Dec. 31, sign up to play in our annual stock-picking contest. Winner gets lunch on us.			Boeing Digest Sign up for our Boeing e-mail newsletter.

Weekly interest and loan rates | Northwest stock contest 2003 Tax tips | Consumer affairs | Home values

Internet maps raise fears about abuse

By May Wong
The Associated Press

	JENNIFER SZYMASZEK / AP Sonjia Kenya of Brooklyn, N.Y., vows to keep her phone number private because it can be used to create an Internet map to her home.
	E-mail this article Print this article Search archive

St. Louis-area serial killer Maury Travis used an online mapping service to show a newspaper reporter where he dumped a body. A former Las Vegas exotic dancer convicted of stalking and harassing her ex-lover posted a map on the Web with directions to the married man's home.

Internet mapping services are powerful and simple: Type a phone number into Google or other sites for a map with door-to-door directions. Finding someone has never been easier.

Now those resources are provoking a backlash. People worried about stalkers or worse are striking their particulars from phone and Internet listings.

Count Sonjia Kenya among them. The 30-year-old is no stranger to the Internet, but was stunned recently to learn how easy it is to go online and get directions to her front door. All it takes is her phone number.

"I was appalled and petrified as a single woman living in New York," Kenya said. She vows never again to give her phone number to potential suitors.

Many home addresses are attainable through a variety of public records and telephone listings. As well, reverse directories that let someone look up an address by phone number have been available at libraries or for sale commercially for years.

But many Internet sites that gather that kind of data now make it possible for fast, do-it-yourself desktop sleuthing, some for free and some for a fee. Search-engine provider Google added a phone-number-map lookup feature more than two years ago.

There's also FindPeople.com, WhitePages.com and Switchboard.com, among others. If the sites don't have a direct link to a map, users can go on their own to such free sites as Yahoo! Maps, MapQuest or Microsoft's MapPoint. Tens of millions of people use those mapping services each month to help them get places.

Navigation Technologies, which supplies the digital road maps used by those Web sites, has seen revenue more than double in three years, to $165.8 million in 2002. It is expected to top $200 million this year.

The Internet features are convenient tools for everyone, whether to look up a long-lost friend or relative — or with malicious intent.

Earlier this month, Steven Sutcliffe of Manchester, N.H., who had been fired by Global Crossing, was convicted of identity theft and use of the Internet to threaten company executives. He had created a Web site that included employees' Social Security numbers and maps to some of their homes. Sutcliffe, who represented himself during the final weeks of trial, had told the jury he "was just publishing information."

By all accounts, however, the popularity of Internet maps has more to do with benefits than sinister uses.

"For a lot of people now, especially those with broadband connections, the first place they go to for information is online," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. "But people are still warming up to the idea that lots of information about them is online."

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company