Ever wanted to drop off the face of the Earth?

You are not alone. Turns out that a signficant fraction of missing people are intentionally missing.

The article at Wired details how these folks are hunted down using modern data collection techniques. If you're on the grid, you're probably going to be found. A particularly clever trick:

"Then Klein decided to set up a Web site about the disappearance. Purporting to be asking for tips, it was designed specifically to trap visitors’ IP addresses. Suspecting that McDermott was in contact with at least one confidant from his former life — and relying on the investigator’s maxim that people on the run always monitor the pursuit — Klein blocked search engine crawlers from cataloging the site. He gave the URL only to McDermott’s friends and family. Ninety-six hours later, it started registering multiple daily hits from an IP address in the beach town of Sayulita, Mexico. Klein says he eventually tracked McDermott around South America and contacted him through an intermediary."

One common mistake, as it turns out, is keeping your old personality. Even folks who want to become a new person entirely eventually relax back into the person that they were, and that's when they get caught.