It turns out you don’t need to take a nude photo and post it on Facebook to earn a bad reputation.  You just need a presence on the internet.

I discovered this when I was looking for the phone number of an acquaintance, couldn’t find it in my local phone directory, and went on-line to continue the search.

Just because a search engine leads you to an innocent sounding link, such as “Click here. Have we got a ton of phone numbers for you,” doesn’t mean you’ll find what you’re seeking. The first clue that you’re going to waste a lot of time, and have to pay for the effort is, “Your search is 100% confidential. This person will never know what you’re up to.”

On my first try I reached a site that assured me I would find a phone number, but failed to mention that I would also be privileged to have access to the acquaintance’s marriage and/or divorce records, arrest records, traffic offenses, felonies within the county, state and country, and the same information about the rest of her family. All this for only a ten-minute wait followed by a request for $9.98.

On another site I found her address, the square footage and condition of her home, but no phone number.

Now I look back fondly to the days when my husband complained every time a phone book the size of a bus landed on our doorstep.  “They ought to put this information on-line,” he said.  Now that they have, I long for one of those hefty tomes of yesteryear.

Finally, I scrapped the phone number search, because I was curious as to what the internet said about me. Here’s what I learned from one site: I’m in my forties, have two arrest records, and once worked for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  All this was news to me. (read about the time Facebook told me I was at Bill Gates’ home.) I alerted my husband to come witness our miraculous return to near youth.  This time the site aged me by two decades and left him in his forties.

I also found five pages of my quotes in a random selection of newspaper and TV pieces from my years as a school district spokeswoman, and ages old insulting reader comments in response.

At this point, I can’t see any reason not to publish nude photos on Facebook.