What do you think about posts / pages where people are looking for other people?

[Namechange12309]

Im sure there will be genuine cases where for bad reasons someone has gone missing.

But a lot of posts I see (mainly Facebook) people will be looking for others from their past, post where they went to school, what road they lived on, spouses name and surname and a tonne of other identifiable information and people will flood with comments saying is it this chap he works in this pub…

What if they don’t want to be found? What if they fell out or there’s bad history there?

One just now - son walked out 10 years ago as an adult, is known to have gone to another country but they suspect he’s back, no illness, of course no other background as to why he left. Again people turning detectives posting screenshots of profiles of people with the same name, someone even posted a mobile number??

Kind of the same vibe with adoptive siblings - what if they were separated for dysfunctional reasons and want to lay low?

Just feels off to me.

I agree. Unfortunately you never know why someone is asking.....we had a case locally where someone was looking for information about a woman and he posted lots of information about her. People were responding with various bits of info and it turned out the person asking was her abusive ex!

Of course there are genuine reasons why people may have lost touch but in most cases there's a reason for it and it isn't always a favourable one.

Yes I did think that could also be a possibility!

I agree. There's an exception, I suppose, for old school fellows on an old girls (or old boys) website, but that's about it.

I have seen a couple where I thought I might know the person but since the poster did not say why they wanted to know, I did nothing.

The ethical thing would be to pass on the contact details of the searcher to the person being looked for, not giving the searcher information about the missing person.

Exactly. They can make contact if they want to be found, or if not then at least they know the person is looking for them and can take steps to protect themselves.

I always report threads on here which are asking for help finding people. You have absolutely no idea who is asking (or why!). Usernames are anonymous on here, but even so, people with nefarious motivation might just be fishing for current usernames. For example "what happened to MNnamex? I often think of them and hope they are OK". This is usually coming from a good place, but if it is someone trying to find an ex/relation then it's really not helpful to let them know "oh, she still posts under MNnamexv2". Alternatively, you will get posts saying "I have a subscription to XYZ - pm me the details and I'll have a dig around for you". Very kind of the person offering to help, but not necessarily the right/sensible thing to do.

As people above have said, if it is somewhere like FB where people (mostly) use real names, then the sensible thing to do is to let the person being looked for know that they are being looked for so that the decision to make contact is up to them.