"We live in an information age," says Kevin Roark, a Grayson County College professor. "Information is prevalent and delivered right to our computers now."

If you want to see how easy it is to get information on you, try this. Type your own name and your city into a search engine. Chances are, it will come back with your address and phone number, and maybe much more. If you can find that, so can almost anyone else.

"It's very difficult because a lot of that is a matter of public record," Roark says. "It's accessible because we have freedom of information, so it becomes available."

So how do they get all of this information? Sometimes, they get it from you!

"Many of the free services that people subscribe to are simply services set up to acquire information," he says. "They profile you, acquire information about you, and that's sold to other people."

When you sign up for a newsletter or a chat session, you probably have to fill out a profile about yourself. Before you do, look for a link that tells you how that info will be used. If everyone will have access to it, you'll want to be very careful about what you include.

"There are also services I can enroll in or subscribe to that I can get drivers license information, court records, credit scores, a lot of personal information about just about anybody, and it's fairly inexpensive," Roark says.

The best policy: never give out personal information Online, like your phone number or address or credit card numbers, unless you know exactly who's getting it and how it will be used.

"Especially things like blogs, Usenet groups, anything you create digitally is recoverable, so always remember that," he says. "Even through an e-mail, if you send personal information through e-mail, somebody could forward that on so you need to be careful about what you put in any kind of digital form."