My most sensitive searches are when I lookup people online. Google only gets you so far. With enough money, you can throw a few coins at data broker firms and get back solid 'dox' on many people. It depends on how online a person is, and how much they unwittingly divulged to various services (services that sell their data to people-search firms and other brokers).
I have the real name of several so called 'anonymous' online personalities, but I won't divulge this info. I was curious recently about a Twitter account posting under a pseudonym and wanted to see if their opsec was tight. Turns out it wasn't. Their real name was discovered in ~15 minutes with some heavy Googling.
Imagine if you can simply throw money at the problem and forgo Google entirely, getting not only their legal name, but other PII too?
For example, Intelius does background checks, reverse phone number lookups etc. One small piece of information can lead to others. As far as unwitting, of course. The wikipedia page says that company has acquired background check companies, a facebook genealogy app company, classmates.com and a "people" search engine company... not to mention all the public databases that are available (criminal records, property records) The've been collecting online and offline data on people for almost 20 years. I'm sure they have data scraped from sites that don't exist any more. Combine that with the current terminally online population and I think it would be surprising to most regular people how much data is out there.
I have the real name of several so called 'anonymous' online personalities, but I won't divulge this info. I was curious recently about a Twitter account posting under a pseudonym and wanted to see if their opsec was tight. Turns out it wasn't. Their real name was discovered in ~15 minutes with some heavy Googling.
Imagine if you can simply throw money at the problem and forgo Google entirely, getting not only their legal name, but other PII too?