I noticed that Pipl.com had spidered some of my website's content. It's a people search engine that claims to spider the deep web, basically lots of user profiles that usually remain hidden. I'm not sure I'm happy with the privacy implications of that, it's stuff that's online already but I think it could be a wake-up call to a lot of people just how much of their stuff can be pieced together. That's if this takes off: at the moment it isn't returning much more than the main search engines. Has anyone else come across this yet? I found it quite slow in practice.
I'd not heard of it, just tried the obvious test - my own name, and I don't exist! (though I tried a couple of friends names and a lot of stuff did come up). It's something that people are going to have to get used to - I think it's only an issue when sites change their policy on what is publicly searchable - as Facebook has recently - they did warn people and you can change your privacy settings, but I'm sure a lot of people who don't look at it often won't know that their facebook entries are now searchable on google - I didn't know that friendster was now until I saw my own entry in a search when I was checking on something else.
My own experience bears this out. When people sign up for my writing website it's clear on the registration form that the profiles are public. But I've had people sign up and soon after ask to be removed, because they found their profiles were appearing in search results.