To think is not too nosy?

So you basically stalk people and try to justify your behavior by calling it inquisitive. Your completely in the wrong here, others should feel free to speak without fear your checking up on them online. I'd also like to know what business ot is of yours what someone's house sold for!!!
This is crazy behavior and if I found out a friend or colleague had done that to me, I'd definitely be confronting them.

No one who runs a business thinks that 😂It's like the easiest thing to look up how much is in their business bank account/s and what assets they have.

I can't believe 40% of respondents think this is ok!
I have a friend who would do this, she is fantastic in every other way but this makes me think less of her- it's totally demeaning to hunt after strangers info, why on earth would you GAF?
And as for the PP who said not doing this kind of thing means you're uninterested in life- this is not being interested in life. Being interested in the world and life means investigating food, culture, language, literature, religion, architecture. It does not mean small minded snooping and grubbing around for other people's information.

If you’ve got lots of free time, it could be put to better use being an amateur / arm chair sleuth for real life unsolved crimes . There are loads of these people in the US.

That uses your time, might have a positive outcome and is less stalkerish / weird/ grim behaviour from yourself. If you wouldn’t ask the person in conversation, it’s weird (putting it politely) to do it behind their back.

Because im a weirdo.

I also love murder documentaries and Google earthing the area after

Don't worry I'm not masked murderer. I'm happily married with two youngens

Some people are being very precious here!! The information she found was freely available online - fully accessible to everyone🙄

But why? Why would knowing how much the house of a random person you met on holidays sold for be of interest to you, or its layout, or what it looked like from overhead?

I'm sort of similar to this, I'd highly recommend doing a history degree. My research is always excellent, even if what I have written isn't quite to the same standard 😅

I do this all the time; most people are impressed by my research skills! If the information is publicly available, I can’t see why anyone would have a problem.

Omg @azureazure we could soooo be best pals.

I love this type of behaviour. I would also look on right move at their house lay out and then probably log in to Google earth for an aerial view

Totally stalker but I'm not harming anyone.

Completely normal 🤣. I do this and so does my friend. We are naturally inquisitive.

Why? That's a good question; I suppose I find the challenge of seeing what I can find out from very minimal information enjoyable, which is what the OP said in their opening post as well. I don't understand why people can't accept that other people may find enjoyment in things that they don't
I can't fathom why people watch Strictly, or Love Island, but lots of people seem to enjoy it, and fair play to them.
Don't get me wrong, I really don't spend hours doing this, I work full time and have children, just occasionally I will go down a rabbit hole of research.
If you think I do this with friends IRL then you have completely misunderstood what I (and the OP) have said, what we are talking about is completely non-intrusive. I'm not one of those annoying and rude people that keep probing for private information.

Anyway, regardless of whether people think this is right or wrong, the issue here is that the OP thinks it's right but her DP doesn't and that is going to cause tension.

Ummm yea that's weird 🤣 blows my mind when people are so concerned with others. Did that knowledge of them strangers help you in anyway? I doubt it, just sounds like you're a bit bored.

You must be very clever.

@Youdontevengohere I'd expect people to look at publicly available information if they had a need to for a specific reason. I wouldn't expect them to go trawling through a person's information for no reason other than nosiness. It's not really the same as judging people who watch love island, since the latter involves people who actively want viewers to know all about them.
There's something about searching out small pieces of information from varying sources and then putting it all together that's just creepy AF.

And the OP is being pretty disingenuous to couch it in terms of ‘looking up someone interesting’. I met an artist recently, and afterwards I looked up her work, as I love art and going to galleries and museums, and have bought work from local artists in the past, plus we exchanged numbers and are going to meet for a drink. She mentioned a fairly obscure artist who was active between the 1930s and 50s whose name was only vaguely familiar to me and I looked up that artist’s work, and which collections owned pieces.

I wasn’t motivated by pure nosiness to try to figure out how much money a holiday acquaintance had, because they didn’t give me what I considered sufficient details about their visible wealth.

So is knowing when to mind one’s business.

As has already been explained, that analogy is nothing like spot on.

It shouldn’t be surprising to people that information they put online is read by other people.

The human propensity to gossip and be interested in our neighbours is extremely well known- it’s glaringly obvious that new technology would be incorporated into that.

It's all a bit sneaky isn't it? If you are friends with someone of dealing with a school mum, colleague etc, why not take them at face value for who they are, what they say and how they interact with you? I'd feel so petty and a bit basic if I looked up other people's house prices and god knows what else. This is why I don't let my dc's school share any pictures or posts about my dc. I know some mothers who follow other children's schools on the various channels to keep track of how their dc are doing, what prizes they're winning, how well they sports teams are doing. They are behaving like stalkers of children.

We all understand that anyone can read information that's online.

We're aware that dodgy people will search all they can about someone and put together every bit of info for nefarious purposes eg romance scammers or other kinds of fraudsters.

What has taken many of us aback is that there are a number of ordinary people who do this out of nosiness and just to pass the time.

The earlier analogy of asking to use someone's bathroom and then rooting through the bathroom cabinet is spot on.

Ridiculous comment. There have been plenty of explanations on here about why this information is public.
Also why would it matter to you to try to keep it private that you bought your house for say 525k when it had been publicly listed on Rightmove for 540k and the vendor already told the neighbours what offer he'd accepted? You seriously think that people should be prosecuted for revealing that information?!

It sounds a really boring way to spend your time.

You can't go back and look at whay they've posted to prove they said it though. That's private information. Or something like that.