I do have stories about this.
Well, story time! We are waiting.
Very well. I agree to make all of you super suspicious of me.
I've relatively cautious about what I put out on the internet, because I know just how easy it is to stalk someone. It's why I avoid saying anything that can tie me to a location (like my job). I know it's easy to stalk someone because
I'm really good at stalking people. Sketchy right? Fortunately because I have a strong moral fiber I don't use my skill without good reason. Hence the stories...
A few years back my youngest brother went missing. He was about 12 years old at the time. He was visiting a new friend's house and was supposed to call our parents when he got there to arrange a pickup time. Him not calling in worried my parents a bit, so they asked if I could find him. All they new for sure was that his friend's name was "Jake". Not a lot to work with.
I started by browsing my brother's Facebook friends looking for a "Jake". No luck there. I checked his Instagram instead, and found that he was following someone named "Jacob" with a freakishly long last name. Probably Eastern European. Anyway, I looked up that family name in the phone book and managed to find their address. Went to that house and sure enough, my brother was there. He just forgot to call in.
To this day I still haven't told him how I found him, I only ever said "You can't hide from me." This story should show how easy it is to find someone in the age of information. I managed to find a person, in a city, just based on someone's first name.
On a separate occasion, I found a lost phone. The picture on the lock screen was a young woman posing for the picture in some suburban area. I figured she was likely the girlfriend to whoever owned this phone. In the picture I could make out two important pieces of information; a street sign and a large maple tree in a front lawn. I went on Google maps, searched the street name, and then went into street view, looking for a maple tree. Once I found it, I could see which house the picture was taken from. I called that house (fortunately it still had a landline) and the woman in the picture picked up. The phone belonged to her step-brother. I didn't ask any more questions about this, I just arranged a meet-up at the local mall to hand over the phone. Not my business why her step-brother has a picture of her.
I later found out that this was a little excessive. A lot of phones have the "emergency dial" option which can bring up their most frequent contact and you can just call them. It's used in emergency situations if you need to know things like allergies and underlying medical conditions.