As many couples will tell you, one of the most surprising things about planning a wedding is how much minutiae there is to take care of. Exhibit A: the font you use to designate the numbered signs on your tables.

But a couple of nights ago as I was updating my wedding registry, I discovered a new detail to fret over: A website set up in the name of myself and my fiancé that we didn’t create.

The page, which was built by the bridal website The Knot, features our full names, wedding date and links to some of our registries as well as pictures of the grey napkins and robot vacuum we picked out. It even includes a location for our wedding, which happens to be wrong. (It’s my fiancé’s hometown, but I assume it was chosen because my future in-laws have graciously agreed to let us have our gifts shipped to their home.)

My (now deleted) registry page on The Knot.

The site looks, at first glance, like the type of wedding site a couple might create themselves. The Knot lets its registered users create such sites for free, but my fiancé and I made a conscious decision not to partake of this service.

We chose the slightly harder — and more expensive — route of building a site with a clean layout and our own domain name because we wanted the site to reflect our internet savvy and by extension, our taste. (We’ve worked in digital media for a combined 12 years.)

And yet, when I Googled my name and my fiancé’s name together, the page The Knot created without our permission was the top result. The Knot deleted the site after I reached out to the company for comment on this piece, but below is a screenshot of the Google results when I first discovered the site.

As silly as it sounds, I’m annoyed that the expression of my style that I curated appeared (at least for a time) in Google results below a, frankly, ugly site that I didn’t realize I had authorized.

The Google search results that helped me discover The Knot site.

Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton University and an expert on internet privacy, correctly captured my angst when he told me that privacy “is not so much secrecy, but the ability to control how we present ourselves in the world.”

The whole thing is creepy, but it also serves as a stark reminder that our personal information is floating around the ether for companies to use. “There are a million different ways in which different aspects of your activities are observed and put into databases,” Narayanan said.

When I signed up for my registries at Bloomingdale’s, Crate and Barrel and Amazon, the fine print stated that those companies could share this information with The Knot (other retailers also partner with The Knot in a similar way). A spokeswoman from Bloomingdale’s confirmed this policy, but the company will remove a couple’s registry from the site upon request. A spokeswoman at Crate and Barrel said that couples have the opportunity to opt-out of having their information shared with The Knot when they sign up with the store. Amazon didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The Knot said in an email that it partners with several retailers to aggregate couples’ registries into one site for “easy searching and sharing,” adding that the goal of the site is to be helpful to the couple.

But there’s a benefit to The Knot too. Every time someone purchases a gift from a registry link they click on through The Knot site, the company gets a commission. In other words, I unwittingly agreed for my likeness to be used as a way for the company to make money.

Couples can go through The Knot’s email or phone customer service channels to have the site taken down. Online, The Knot warns that it could take up to 28 days for a link to the site to disappear from Google.

For some, these sites can have serious consequences, said Pam Dixon, the founder of World Privacy Forum, a nonprofit privacy advocacy organization. Dixon said she receives an average of three or four calls a year from brides or grooms asking for her help dealing with a wedding website created in their name that the caller didn’t create themselves. In the most sensitive situations, the person getting married may have been a victim of domestic violence or left behind a messy former relationship, and he or she doesn’t want to have their wedding information easily located.

A quick spin around wedding forums and The Knot’s own site indicated other less serious, but still frustrating, consequences. A Reddit user detailed how their best friend booked a non-refundable flight to the wrong location based on the destination listed on The Knot site the user didn’t create. Other online complaints include publicizing wedding details that the couple wanted to keep private from estranged family members.

In an email, The Knot said it takes privacy and data security, “very seriously.” If a couple makes their registry private, or decides not to share their information with The Knot, then the firm won’t make a site for them.

“ ‘It’s a reminder of the ways companies can take the information you provide them and mush it together for their own purposes.’ ”

Of course, I could have paid closer attention to the fine print when I was creating my registries. I admit, I wasn’t so vigilant. My internet persona is more public than most people’s because of my job, so I had no problem making my registries and wedding website public, meaning they’re searchable. Nonetheless, it was jarring to discover that a site had seemingly appeared out of thin air in my name. It’s a reminder of the ways companies can take the information you provide them and mush it together for their own purposes.

Given the complicated nature of many privacy policies, it seems unreasonable to expect people to read them all the way through, said Narayanan. Research indicates that if American internet users were to read privacy policies in their entirety every time they visited a new site, it would cost the country $781 billion a year, based on the value of the opportunities lost in the time spent reading the policies.

Even if the disclaimer that your information will be shared with another website isn’t buried in a privacy policy, in some cases users may be asked to opt out instead of opt in, which can be problematic, Dixon said. (Bloomingdale’s disclaimer is on the top of the 4th page of sign up information in relatively small print above information like the store’s customer service website.)

In the lead-up to his own wedding a few months ago, Narayanan took pains to make sure the vendors he used protected his privacy. He researched wedding sites to find the one employing the fewest “trackers” — the companies that monitor your internet activity. He also paid extra to prohibit his photographer from using images from his wedding in promotional materials, a reminder that to a certain extent, “privacy is a luxury for the wealthy,” he said.

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When Narayanan researched photographers initially he found that permission to use his image for promotion appeared to be a pretty standard part of the deal; when he asked his photographer whether he could opt out, the photographer said it would cost him, but took time to name a price because it appeared Narayanan was the first person to ever ask. “It was this constant process of vigilance and being watchful,” he said.

That comfort with internet displays of affection combined with an interest in driving the narrative of my wedding (or frankly other aspects of my personal life) makes me pretty typical of my peers, said Meghan Ely, the owner of OFD Consulting, a marketing firm that works with wedding vendors.

Now I’m beginning to understand that’s rarely the case. As Paul Stephens, the director of policy and advocacy for privacy rights at Privacy Rights ClearingHouse, puts it: “You should always assume that somehow that information may be shared.”