Peekaboo: Just When You Thought You Couldn't Be Found

Peekaboo: Just When You Thought You Couldn't Be Found

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Ever told someone that you couldn't be found on Facebook, and later that person finds you? Even after you've jacked up all the privacy settings so even some of your "friends" have limited profile access? If you've answered 'yes' then the word 'creepy' is probably part of your vocabulary. However, sometimes you are just dealing with a person who doesn't take a challenge lightly and has a great deal of free time...

Hi, nice to meet you.

There's two statements as a creep boredom driven individual that we know to probably be true:

You probably belong to other social networking websites.

Let's face it, there's several avoirdupois pounds of websites on the internet that offer to connect you to other people. Some of these websites are for finding old friends, some for making new friends and some for both. The whole purpose is to make connections (and inundate you with advertising). The most popular are just that; popular. There are some people who use very few, but we are working off of an assumption for the general population. If you are electronically anti-social, then how are you supposed to find the lolcats?

You probably have friends on other social networking websites.

Your friends are connected with you the same way you are connected with them on a social media website; through some sort of list. They are on your list, just like you are on theirs. While you may have hidden your list (along with the rest of your profile) to the public, there's a good chance they may not have hidden theirs. We as boredom driven individuals are counting on this.

This is how it works. We will first Google you, finding anything on the internet to which you may be attached. What we find might not only be websites but frequent usernames as well. We count on people owning their username (or an iteration) across several websites, perhaps listing interests that may be included in a search to narrow down common names. What we are really looking for are your connections. Again, we are counting on your friends not needing the same privacy as you do. Your friend may have linked us to all of their social media. And in turn, given us a backdoor to find your profile.

Let's go through a hypothetical example. You are a new co-worker at the office and we have some interoffice communication through e-mail that includes your full name. I would enter your name into Google, and I might find your old MySpace account (forgot you had one, didn't you?) which might include the username that was offered to personalize your MySpace web address. I'll search the username and might find a Twitter account, describing how this person just got a new job. Then I'll look through posts made between the account holder and other people, determining which accounts are actually people the account holder actually knows through post context. I will then check the profiles for those people to see if there are links back to Facebook, or start from the beginning using that persons name to find their Facebook. Once I have their public Facebook, then I will more than likely find you within their list of connections.

But you say you don't have a Twitter! That's fine. You probably have something else like Foursquare which links directly to Facebook / Twitter profiles in the event a person included them; meaning your friend. There's seemingly no escape! Right?

I found you! Now what?

Remember that finding your profile is different than actually viewing it. If you've set your privacy up throughout the internet, finding you isn't going to do anybody much good if they can't view the content. Though, there are a few sites you might want to look at yourself that don't require a lot of work to use.

spokeo.com - This website has been toned down a lot since I first used it for investigations. Try typing your name or phone number and see what comes up. The results may surprise you.

tnid.us - A searchable database of phone numbers for the United States. You are able to see how many times the website has searched for a particular number and you are also given the option to remove a record from the database as well as update it.

So remember on the internet, you are only as private as your friends.