By now, it’s well known that almost anyone you meet — from a potential employer to a prospective date — might be searching for information about you online. But would you feel strange knowing that your doctor was Googling you?

The practice appears to be widespread, according to an essay in the latest edition of the Harvard Review of Psychiatry, and it raises some thorny ethical questions for doctors, particularly those dealing with mental health.

In some cases, what the authors call “patient-targeted Googling” is clearly beneficial — for example, when a patient is blogging about her suicidal thinking, or when an unconscious person comes into an emergency room with scant identification. But in other cases, the authors write, doctors are motivated by “curiosity, voyeurism and habit.”

“Most patients would probably be shocked that their doctor had the time or the interest to conduct a search like this,” one of the authors, David Brendel, said in an interview. “A good number of people would feel like their privacy had been breached, although a number might be happy the doctor was thinking about them outside of the 15 minutes or 30 minutes they were actually spending together.”

Dr. Brendel said he had seen no formal data on how often doctors conduct such searches but that the authors had done it themselves, had witnessed other physicians conducting searches and had discussed it with dozens in their field, psychiatry. He said doctors such as psychiatrists and psychologists who have long-term doctor-patient relationships might be more inclined to search for patients’ information online.

In the paper, the authors — Dr. Brendel and fellow doctors Benjamin Silverman and Brian Clinton — outline a framework that doctors, psychiatrists in particular, can use to help decide whether to conduct an Internet search on a patient. They recommend that doctors ask themselves honestly about their intent in conducting the search and whether the outcome might compromise the trust and relationship between the doctor and patient. Doctors, they say, should consider asking the patient for consent. And if doctors find compromising information — such as evidence that a patient has been smoking or taking drugs without acknowledging it — they then face the question of whether to put the results of the search into the patient’s medical record, where it could affect the patient’s insurance status.

As of now, there are no clear ethical guidelines for doctors. “Some people say absolutely it should never be done; it’s a breach of privacy … ” Dr. Brendel said. “But then many say it should be done as a matter of routine. It’s information that is in the public domain, and it may be information that is clinically relevant.”

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