Pat Elliott who often sends me some great story ideas, sent in this story with this comment:: “Where are the privacy police and why are they so silent?”

Note the irony: This story arrived as her status update in FB!

Let’s face it, status updates in Twitter and Facebook are feeding the algorithm monster, and we happily submit details of our lives. (I have to say I keep a lot of things out of my tweets –family matters, trivia etc.)

But as this article notes, that the new search tools can drill into keywords, hashtags, usernames even Twitter DMs.

It’s enough to make you wonder about how creepy Search has become, and what it means for privacy. (Remember this story about Yahoo and the Chinese dissident?) There are plenty of tools out there already.

If you haven’t tried this search engine, Pipl, it’s a useful way to find people you would like to track down. But … you know what this means: your details are also freely available to anyone as well.

Watch how Pipl works here: