People Search Engines: They Know Your Dark Secrets … and Tell Anyone
By JR Raphael, PC World

Social search engines can turn up your Amazon Wish List, photos of your kids, where your kids go to school, your address, your business, where you went to school, your musical tastes, your medical problems, all about your breakups & divorces, your mental health status and much, much more. What else is out there that you don't want everyone to know, and what can you do to protect yourself?


I know things about my lawyer I absolutely should not know. He's 55 years old, listens to the music of the band Creed, and screams like a little girl when riding roller coasters. He also relaxes with New Age spa treatments and is thinking about getting an electronic nose-hair trimmer. And that's just the start.

Now, let me be clear: I've never spent a single moment outside the office with this guy (and for what it's worth, I'd just as soon not be privy to his personal grooming habits). I learned all of these details by tracking his social footprint across the Web -- and he probably has no idea that he has left such a vivid trail behind.

In our age of social sharing, we expect some of our thoughts to be public. But as we slowly put more and more pieces of ourselves online, specialized search engines are making it easier than ever to pull them together into a highly detailed (and potentially invasive) profile of our virtual lives (read "Online Stalking Made Easy").

I'll let you in on a little secret: The picture isn't always pretty. And even if no rap sheet turns up, do you really want the world to know that you look at bad-breath cures online or post awful "Star Trek" fan fiction?

The depths of the Deep Web
You hear a lot of terms bounced around when you talk about this growing breed of search engines. Some services like to be called "social search" utilities, while others prefer the phrase "people search." Many boast of their ability to delve through the "Deep Web" that even Google doesn't touch.

"Even though most people think the size of the Web is basically the Google crawl index, there's actually a lot of information that Google doesn't crawl," says Harrison Tang, founder and CEO of Spokeo -- which, taking a mash-up approach to its identification, describes itself as a "social people search engine" service.

People search engine Spokeo is upfront about what it thinks it can find on anyone.
Spokeo, like its competitors Pipl and CVGadget, is designed to let you dig up information on friends, foes and anyone in between. Spokeo goes a step further than many of the other services, though, by importing your entire e-mail address book.

Then, for a few bucks a month, it continually monitors your contacts and lets you know whenever anyone has done anything new, anywhere online. (The site's home page promises to help you "uncover personal photos, videos and secrets," including "juicy" and "mouth-watering news about friends and co-workers.")

Each individual bit of information may seem insignificant, but the cumulative effect of seeing it assembled in a neatly packaged portfolio is enough to give almost anyone pause.

"Aggregated identity is actually a new type of identity," Tang says, theorizing about why so many people seem to use the word "spooky" when describing his service. "A lot of people know that they have a public MySpace page, a lot of people know that they have a public Twitter album. But, when combined together, it's not one plus one equals two -- you actually create a new identity."

How Spokeo works
Spokeo's system uses your contacts' e-mail addresses to track their activity on a few dozen services, ranging from basic blogs and social networks to a slew of photo- and video-sharing sites. That means the random photos of your kids you shared on Flickr two years ago (or perhaps those less innocent images from your spring-break trip a decade earlier) will pop up right under your name, seconds after someone searches for you.
Less obvious sources such as Amazon Wish Lists, Pandora playlists and movie rating sites fill in the colorful details that you may not have realized were out there at all -- things like (in my lawyer's case) an affinity for New Age jams and nasal maintenance.

I found Mr. Attorney's age on an old MySpace profile and his roller coaster behavior on a personal YouTube video, but Pandora divulged his cravings for Creed and his suggested usages for the "Spa Radio" station he had created. As for the nose-hair trimmer, he can thank his Amazon Wish List for sending that factoid my way.

For sale: Your information
Rapleaf gathers information from the Deep Web -- often posted by you -- and sells it to marketers.

Other services access the same data and then sell the information under the banner of marketing research. One highly visible example is Rapleaf, a company that describes its services as "data and people lookup." Clients pay thousands of dollars to have detailed social profiles of individuals compiled in their own customer databases. As is the case with the data that Spokeo assembles, the information is all publicly available -- Rapleaf just brings it together. "Things that people have posted are out there for anyone to come and see," says Joel Jewitt, Rapleaf's vice president of business development. "As long as you're not going beyond that, that's within the privacy norms today."

Most of Rapleaf's clients, Jewitt says, are simply trying to understand how to use social media more effectively for marketing. An auto manufacturer, for example, might want to know which car models its customers are checking out and discussing on social Internet services. Armed with the company's list of customer e-mail addresses, Rapleaf would crawl the Web and track down the information, person by person.

"It's pretty standard Web spidering," Jewitt says. "We re-create in an automatic way what someone from the general public would be able to do if they were looking."

Electronic exposure
Whether they target businesses or individuals, the services have one thing in common: Unlike the public-record-driven search tools of the past, the new people-tracking utilities build a highly detailed dossier about you solely from information that you yourself published -- a circumstance that may give you a distinct feeling of discomfort.

"What it does is make the ubiquity of the Internet and the sheer openness of the world tangible," says Internet privacy expert Kevin B. McDonald, executive vice president of Alvaka Networks, a network management firm. "It makes the whole concept of the world sharing of information and the 'no-walls' approach that the Internet was designed for very real to people."

The reality can be chilling if the information is going to certain interested individuals: a curious client, a boss big on background checks or an obsessive ex, say. A recent study reported that half of all British Internet users surveyed admitted to having used the Internet to look up information on a former flame. The ease with which someone can arrange to monitor your every electronic move certainly adds a new dimension to the idea of fixation.

"It is a little 'stalkery,'" says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "If the information is distributed, that's actually a form of privacy. When it's gathered up in one place, it creates some new risks."

Rotenberg is no fan of companies that assemble nuggets of personal but public information to turn a profit. "The fact that someone's made something public doesn't mean that someone else can sell it," he contends. "I would say even with affirmative consent, if there's going to be a market for personal data, the user should get some percentage of whatever value the data has."

Taking control
The thing to remember, of course, is that these services aren't doing anything illegal. The information they gather is information that anyone who knew where to look -- and had the time to do it -- could find. So rather than ignoring the king-size file that may have been collected on you, McDonald suggests, you should try to use it as a tool to understand and control your online identity.

"I've come to the point where rather than be driven by the Internet, I intend to drive it to the degree that I can," he says.

"All you can do is learn to live with it," McDonald says. "That's the confines of the world that we live in."

For suggestions on concrete steps you can take to reduce your online exposure, see "People Search Engines: Slam the Door on What Info They Can Collect."

ORIGINAL

Labels: cyberharassment, cyberstalking, data mining, information, privacy, public information, social networking, websites

by Stephanie Chen - CNN

Before the explosion of social media, Ken Altshuler, a divorce lawyer in Maine, dug up dirt on his client’s spouses the old-fashioned way: with private investigators and subpoenas. Now the first place his team checks for evidence is Facebook.

Consider a recent story of a female client in her 30s, who came to Altshuler seeking a divorce from husband. She claimed her husband, an alcoholic, was drinking again. The husband denied it. It was her word against his word, Altshuler says, until a mutual friend of the couple stumbled across Facebook photos of the husband drinking beer at a party a few weeks earlier.

It was the kind of “gotcha moment” Altshuler knew would undermine the husband’s credibility in court. His firm presented the photos to the judge, and the wife won the case in April, he said.

“Facebook is a great source of evidence,” Altshuler said. “It’s absolutely solid evidence because he’s the author of it. How do you deny that you put that on?”

Social media stalking skills have become invaluable to the legal world for divorce cases in particular. Online photo albums, profile pages, wall comments, status updates and tweets have become gold mines for evidence and leads. Today, divorce and family law firms routinely cull information posted on social media sites — the flirty exchanges with a paramour, unsavory self-revelations and compromising photographs — to buttress their case.

Labels: cheaters, cheating, digital evidence, divorce, facebook, flirting, information, lies

by Shelby Hill

Many college students use Facebook.com daily without being aware of the cyberstalking threat.

When students put their phone numbers, addresses and other personal information on a social networking site like Facebook, they increase their chances of being a cyberstalking victim, said Michael Kaiser, executive director of the National Cyber Security Alliance.

January was National Stalking Awareness Month and Kaiser said that because people between the ages of 18-24 have the highest victimization rate, due to the popularity of Facebook and MySpace.com, it's important for students to protect themselves against cyberstalking.

"People should be really guarded in sharing personal information," Kaiser said. "I wouldn't suggest that the Internet is a place to write an autobiography."

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project's January 2009 report about adults and social networking websites, 75 percent of Internet users in the 18-24 age group have a profile on a social networking Web site.

A social networking Web site is a place for people to connect with each other by creating a profile that each individual can customize with pictures, contact information and details about interests, such as music and movies, to reflect that person's personality. Kaiser said an e-mail address is usually the only information needed to become part of a social networking Web site.

Some tips Kaiser had for students were install a firewall, anti-spyware, use the highest privacy settings on social networking web sites and limit the information they put online.

Kaiser advised students that they should "be really careful about who you let into your circle."

Along with the active steps that students can take to protect themselves, Kaiser suggested that students enter their names into a search engine to see if they come across information that they didn't know was there.

"People don't even know sometimes how much information about them there is on the Web," Kaiser said. "People leave trails all over the Internet and stalkers will use those trails."

He said stalkers would use anything from an e-mail address to a phone number, street address or instant message, to stalk a victim.

Nick Penta, a pre-veterinary science freshman, said he thinks an ex-girlfriend stalked him over MySpace. He said she sent him several messages and viewed his profile about 20 times a day to learn about his new girlfriend.

Kaiser said stalking is defined as repeated actions that would cause a reasonable person to feel fear.

Penta added that he wasn't scared of his ex's actions.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice's January 2009 report "Stalking Victimization in the United States," of the 3.4 million Americans who reported being stalked, 25 percent reported being cyberstalked through email or instant messaging.

Stephen Orlando, a pre-business freshman said he experienced the same jealous behavior by an ex, over the Internet.

According to the report, 75 percent of stalking victims were stalked by someone they knew.

"The vast majority of stalking is done by people who know each other," Kaiser said.

Even taking into account Orlando and Penta's experiences with exes over the Web, the two men have not chosen to make their Facebook profiles private and non-viewable to users whom they have not given permission.

Kaiser advised students to "use the highest privacy settings you can on any of the social networking sites."

Amy Cheng, a pre-physiology freshman, said her Facebook profile is private and she doesn't post her personal information on the page.

"I don't put anything on there that I wouldn't show my mom," Cheng said about information on her Facebook profile.

Emily Smith, an undeclared freshman, said that although her profile isn't private, she doesn't put any contact information on her Facebook profile.
Facebook Stalking Pictures, Images and Photos

She added that if she had more of an issue with cyberstalking she might consider changing her profile to private.

Orlando said that he thinks that cyberstalking is more of an issue for women than men.

"There's a lot more creeper stalker people looking for girls than guys," he said.

Penta said that the difference could be attributed to the fact that some women put relatively provocative photos on their individual profiles.

"They're easier targets, just because their pictures might be more revealing," Penta said.

Whatever the reason, the Department of Justice report did concede that women run a much greater risk for being victims of cyberstalking than men.

Whether the victim is a man or woman, the fact that friends and family support the stalking victim is crucial, Kaiser said.

For more information on cyberstalking, Kaiser said that students should visit the National Center for Victims of Crime's Web site, www.ncvc.org or the National Cyber Security Alliance's Web site, www.staysafeonline.org.

Labels: cyberstalking, data, facebook, information, myspace, stalking, validation