Random personal information generator for tests
JM Alarcon
ASP.NET Visual Developer MVP
MsC Mechanical engineering and business consultant specialist, he has written several books and hundreds of articles on computer science and engineering in specialized press such as PC World, Windows Magazine, dotNetMania... JM is also a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT).
I needed a list of names, last names, phones and aditional personal information of different regions for testing. The first thing I did was to search some list of names and last names in Internet and think about to build an application to generate this information randomly.
But doing a few searches led me to something much better that I want to share: a couple of really interesting pages that allow the generation of random information with several parameters.
The first one is Generatedata.com:
This page allows you to get a list of random personal information created from several options (see the image), and then export this information using several ways, including SQL INSERT statements to insert them in a database. The downside is that it’s only supporting data from certain countries and cities (see the image: Canada, Netherlands, USA and UK), but can still be used for a lot of scenarios. The free version, no registration required, allows you to create up to 200 records at once. After donating $20 we’ll be able to create up to 5000.
The second page must be handled with care.
It’s Fake Name Generator.
Here we can select gender, name type (Latin, Danish, American, Chinese, Hungarian, Slovak and so on until 14 types) and the country (19 countries as total). From this filters a detailed list will be generated with personal information including even a Visa number (a fake number of course), american social security (for USA), email address which can be used to receive a real email and impersonate the person, or UPS tracking number!!! Awesome!
See the result for a female latin name in Spain:
—Olaya Nieto Mascarenas
Salzillo, 35
32570 Maside Email Address: OlayaNietoMascarenas@fontdrift.com Birthday: November 12, 1951 Visa: 4539 5050 6021 8799
Expires: 12/2013 UPS Tracking Number: 1Z 648 597 13 1249 330 9
—
Maside is a little town in Ourense province! I doubt that the street number exists there, but the postal code is fine and belongs to the town. It’s so easy and exact that scares.
We can generate the information one by one or get a large quantity of fake data with the interested fields which can be downloaded in several formats. In this case we have two choises: pay and get the information immediately or use the free version and wait in a queue, in this case we are able to see the time we have to wait.
I hope this is useful!
