Privacy on the Internet

Personally whenever I create any kind of account on the internet I always personalize the privacy settings. This is not always the case with everyone. It is extremely easy to find information about people on the internet, google and other search engines have made this way to easy. All you need to do is type in the persons name on the search engine and you can find out all different types of information about them. When I googled my own name I did not find any relevant information about myself, I feel like this is because I have all of my privacy settings customized. When I googled one of my friends a lot of their information came up including facebook photos they were tagged in.
The only website that I could find information on was Spokeo, which is a website that tries to compile information on a family household. They tell where you live, how much your income is, how many kids you have, and what type of work each person does in the house. A lot of the information on this website is wrong about my family. But still being able to get this sort of information off hand is kinda crazy, and can become unsafe. This is especially unsafe for younger children.