Network Lighthouse

Online privacy and the implications of data aggregation is a bit of a passion of mine, that’s part of what inspired me to write the thunderbird plugin.

Here’s an interesting story about one journalists discovery of what he found out about himself.

What the Web knows about you.

People wonder why identity theft happens, so much of our personal data is available online these days that it’s possible to build a fairly complete profile of anyone you want.  Just one of the reasons everyone needs to be careful needs to be careful of what they post on social networking sites.

-Daniel

So you’re about to hire a new team member or maybe your boss left and you want to find out about the new guy. Whatever the cause at some point in time most have us have used Google to try and find out about someone. For those who have not tried this, it is often more difficult than it sounds. For example if you search for my name, even with quotes, returns over 150,000 results not one of the first 100 actually referred to me (I stopped looking after that).

This in mind how do you find out about someone using the web?

Firstly your going to need something a little more unique that a persons name. According to the 1990 US census, almost 3% of males had a first name of James and 1% of the population has the last name of Smith. This means that 1 in around 3000 males (in the US) are called James Smith. Given the current population of the US, around 300 Million, there are about 100 thousand people called James Smith in the US alone.

Of course this is the worst case scenario but it points out why names by themselves are not enough to successfully build a profile. What you need is some other details about the person, things like companies worked for, names of partners, and ideally an email address. If your recruiting the person you’re looking for, then their resume or CV will have previous employers and maybe an email address.

To make this article somewhat interesting, I’ll go through the whole process using myself as an example. Here’s what we (in terms of this article) know about me, my name is Daniel Thomas and I have worked for Virgin Blue airlines. Lets go back to google and search for me with that information with this string ‘”Daniel Thomas” “Virgin Blue”‘. This turns out to be a much better search, only returning 60 results. Going through the results one by one can be painful but fruitful exercise.

Here are the relevant results, I’ve eliminated the results that dont have any relevance:

• LinkedIn (we’ll come back to this one later)
• The Juice
  • A report on a company party, including a photo of the subject (me)
• Alumni Newsletter
  • Here’s one I’d forgotten about, not only confirming where I worked, but also work colleagues and where I went to University.

So now we know now:

• Name: Daniel Thomas
• Employer: Virgin Blue
• School at University: CIT @ Griffith University
• A photo of me from a company party
• And a list of people that I’ve worked with

Lets move on to social networks, one of the great advantages and perils of social networking sites is the amount of personal information that people can put online and share with others.

We’ve already seen LinkedIn, as it came up in the search results. Have a quick look at what it says about me. You will quickly see a full career summary with most of the jobs I’ve ever had, any education that I’ve added.
Unfortunately for this article thats about the end of the paper trail for me, I’ve gone to some efforts over the years to keep my personal details just that, with the exception of what I chose to publish at LinkedIn. Even so there is enough out on the web to buildup something of a profile.

Other social networks can be a great source of personal information, the only problem is identifying which sites a person uses. If you know their email address then this process becomes a lot simpler with RapLeaf. Just plugin their email address and they’ll search all the major social sites and show you which ones have a profile for the address you entered. In some cases they’ll even link straight to the profile you are after.

Going beyond this things get a bit complicated, but here are some other ideas of places that can be useful for finding information about people.

• News Articles LexisNexis
• Court Records
• Phone Books
• ZoomInfo
• If you don’t mind spending some money, you could also use a commercial background checking services

Anytime you find something new about a person, go back to google and search for them again trying the new information as well.

Thats it for this article, hope you found it educational.

-Daniel