How rich are your new neighbors? Who just called your phone? Want to pretend you’re somebody else? There’s an Internet technology out there to collect the information you need. And even if you’re not interested, an identity thief, marketing company, government snoop or nosy neighbor can surf the Web and probably find out about you.

Scary, isn’t it?

Privacy experts say the phenomenon has more and more people wondering how to keep their personal information offline.

“Trying to safeguard personal privacy in the modern era is one of the biggest challenges that there is,” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C.

Take Chris Hobbs, a 27-year-old information technology manager in Fremont, Calif., for example. He actively tries to keep his personal information offline. He has no blog, no MySpace or Facebook page, and he attempts to make purchases and downloads from Web sites that don’t require an e-mail address, name or phone number. If he has to give out personal details, he makes them up.

When a new service called MyPrivacy from ReputationDefender that promises to find and then erase most of your personal data from the Internet launched earlier this month, Hobbs signed up. “I really wanted to find out what kinds of records are out there,” he says.

The service found more than 100 records of Hobbs’ name and other personal data available on the Web. He says that “probably half” of the records really pertained to him.

MyPrivacy immediately filled out and submitted the forms that various data brokers require for removal of his information. As the brokers process the requests, Hobbs’ information should disappear. While MyPrivacy cannot guarantee 100 percent success, Michael Fertik, the chief executive officer, says the goal is to make it harder for identity thieves, marketers and snoops to find people.

Fertik says more than 200 places exist on the Web where anyone can go and try to retrieve someone’s personal information. Many of the sites allow you to remove or correct your personal information, but doing so is a hassle and new information flows into the databases fairly frequently, meaning you have to go through the whole process again and again.

“There’s a little bit of a whack-a-mole game you’ve got to play,” he says.

A $4.95 monthly fee entitles MyPrivacy to play the game for you.

Evolving Technologies and Privacy Erosion

There’s no question the evolution of Internet technologies, particularly in the realm of search, has made it easier to find publicly available personal information, says Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel for Google.

“The [publicly available] information about ourselves in the past might have been a needle in the haystack,” he says. “These amazing search-engine technologies make it easy to find the needle.”

Take, for example, the evolution of phone-book and mapping technology. In 2003