Private Investigator Public Records Internet Search Privacy Reporting – PI Buzz

Last week, Terry Towery and I presented, “Using Technology in Investigation, including Social Networking Websites” at the Capital Case Defense Penalty Seminar. I spent a good amount of time talking about finding people on Facebook, even if they have a common name. However, in the discussion on Facebook settings, I cited this misleading statement from Facebook:

Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available to everyone, including Facebook-enhanced applications, and therefore do not have privacy settings.

“Publicly available to everyone” and “do not have privacy settings” suggest that you do not have the option to hide your “friends” list. Not true! Since just about everything Facebook is annoying, this setting detail is not out of character. You won’t find it in the complicated privacy settings section.

In the top right corner of your Facebook page you’ll find “Profile” squished between “Home” and “Account”. After selecting “Profile”, scroll to the “Friends” box in the left sidebar. Just above the phrase “See All” is a pencil. Clicking that will open up an edit box, demonstrated in this image.

Uncheck “Show Friend List to everyone”. Now your friends are visible to each other but not to the general public. If you wanted to inform the world that Dashiell Hammett is your friend, you could make an exception by entering his name in the “Always show these friends” box.

Social networking sites continue to refine their people finder tools — and some unintended ones are being exploited by savvy investigators. Linkedin, MySpace, Facebook all have internal search engines to find their member webpages. Linkedin and MySpace have multiple search engines, returning different results. (I demonstrate this in my presentation, Social Networking Sites: Investigating People On the Internet). Conducting the same search from a major search engine will block some sites set by the user to “private” but will return links to private profiles on public sites. The Internet has not been tamed.

Okay, on to Plaxo and their fairly recently introduced “Advanced People Search”. Here’s where an Internet researcher can gather intelligence on people within and outside of their contacts. Again, people review your privacy settings, the memory of which tends to fade over time!

At the advanced people search screen select “People” and enter a name. A list of users tells you whether you are connected to them. Select a name to see their profile, the public portion of their page and the connections they’ve established with other site users. You can also search people by school, company or job title and forward results to your email. Try your own name for a surprise.

I’m writing a longer version of this post for the FMS Research newsletter.

Facebook profiles — “info” and “wall” pages — are often viewable to others in the same network, providing historical and real-time intelligence for your investigations. All this can be done passively without a special request to “friend” them. I have a link (named, Adversary’s Social Network Profile – Admissible in Court) on my social bookmarking site to an article that discusses the admissibility in court of webpages and content from social network profiles.

Admissibility also concerns public records, publicly available personal information and violations of privacy. There are legal and ethical issues that arise in methods of information gathering. Some techniques may be acceptable in an investigation to gather background or investigate fraud that should not be used in litigation. That said, there are ways to passively view content that takes advantage of technical glitches in applications and of a users privacy settings. One of the people I follow on Twitter (see my sites at twitter.com/PIbuzz and twitter.com/ThompsonPI) is twitter.com/BrettTrout. He provides a Google query to obtain private notes that Facebook participants have added to their sites. I have a link to this at my Twitter pages. If you want to search for notes on a particular user’s profile, just insert her name in the search bar as part of your query.