It happens to everyone at some point. The beautiful woman on the bus you didn't speak to. The tall man at the party who slipped out before you got his name. But when Canadian Kouros Jelveh lost track of the woman of his dreams, whom he met in front of then-Texas Governor George Bush's mansion, he decided not to leave things up to fate.

Instead, like a true product of the information age, he went online and tried to find her. Disappointed in sites that he felt were too narrow and not user friendly, he decided to start his own site, pleaseidentify.com. Then he figured that if users could find love online, they could also find stolen cars or missing relatives and even anonymously report suspicious activities of their neighbors.

Now users submit everything from insurance fraud and terrorism tips to information about high school reunions and the location of somone's grave. "We let people use a third party, who is totally neutral, to provide and receive information freely," Jelveh said.

Many of the postings ask for information about specific people without explaining how the poster knows the person or why he or she needs the information. One user posted the name of a woman who he knew had run in the Las Vegas half marathon and asked if anyone knew her e-mail address.

A little creepy? Perhaps.

"From a moral standpoint, what if someone used information collected from the site to commit a crime?" asks Steve Jones, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and founder of the Association of Internet Researchers. "Should the Web site be held accountable? We as a society have to decide that."

Jones suggests that postings like these could one day have repercussions for the Web site.

Legally, however, the issues are not clear. The site is not necessarily liable for the postings of its users, according to Mark McCreary, an attorney who specializes in Internet privacy law. Under an amendment to the Communications Decency Act of 1996, he says, third-party Web sites fall under the category of Internet service providers and aren't responsible for the content their users put up.

"An ISP should not be liable for actions of third parties," he said. "It's just not good public policy."

But the issue becomes "gray," McCreary says, if someone reports damaging information to pleaseidentify.com and the company knows about it but chooses to ignore it.

For his part, Jelveh is not concerned about the potential privacy issues involved with his project. "Privacy was severely degraded in the '90s after the Internet explosion. If someone wants to commit a crime, they'll do it," he says, noting that a lot of personal information is available to people on the Internet if they are willing to pay for it.

And he hopes to help solve crimes, not facilitate them. He says he regularly reports tips to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the FBI and other government agencies. The Alabama Bureau of Investigation has posted three profiles of fugitives on his site. Missing persons Web sites also share their content with pleaseidentify.com, and Jelveh hopes to expand this portion of the site.

But the Web site isn't a mere public service. Posters can expect to pay about $5 a month for the ability to advertise their lost items, lost opportunities, lost loves, depending on the payment options they select.

"It's not a matter of money," Jelveh said. "The site has gone way beyond what I thought it would and I hope to see it grow organically."

But, no, it hasn't helped him find his Texan sweetheart.

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