In the column prior to last week and the one before that I discussed the dubious world of debt collecting and how your privacy is more or less completely violated by the credit reporting industry. I finished the first column suggesting that it might be a good idea to "get off the grid." I now think a better description might be to "get out of the Matrix." Red pill anyone?

Reader Brian Poirier, a private investigator in Houston, wrote regarding the database he uses, LexisNexis, which he tells me is one of the biggest and used by most law firms and many private investigators. Poirier offered to see what he could find about my wife and me -- something that he wrote would "take perhaps five minutes." Of course, I had to see what he could find.

The next day Poirier sent me the reports. He explained, "Since I don’t have full identifiers on you, I just did a search for Mark Gibbs in California: 96 possibles. So I looked at the Whois for Gibbs.com and noted an address in Ventura . . . Mark Gibbs in Ventura showed four matches – one had that same address as the whois. That report is attached. Then [I looked] for someone close in age to you that shares addresses [which] revealed your wife. That report is also attached."

In the reports were my Social Security number (with the last four digits redacted), date of birth, name variations, the date my Social Security number was issued, everywhere I had lived since moving to the United States along with the census data for each area, who my mortgages were with for each property and the price I paid, the current owner of each property, my neighbors’ details, my mother’s name (17 years ago I had a credit card issued to her), and a list of "associated persons" (people who might have some kind of relationship with me), which included my wife’s uncle in North Carolina who I have never met or even spoken to on the phone! And there was even more detail on my wife’s report!

Now just consider that all this data about me had been compiled, without my permission, is mostly correct, highly detailed and available to anyone for a few dollars. That absolutely underlines the problem that the few privacy laws we have are at best weak and at worst ineffectual -- just consider how easily the Bush administration got the telcos to roll over and give up your data.