Here's a fascinating post by Joanna Geary, the web development editor of The Times, How I tracked down an entire family from one tweet.
During a presentation to the Young Journalist Academy, she illustrated just how easy it is to track down information about people online.
Though she wishes to protect the privacy of the individuals involved in her search, she has explained the process, admitting: "It frightens me how simple it was to get all that I did."
This is her full account, which is a lesson to all young journalists and, I suspect, plenty of veterans too.
Step 1
I chose a few keywords "gunfire, shot, attack, missile" and ran them through Twitter search. Most of what I get back is utter rubbish. However, a few genuine tweets shine out. One in particular is particularly interesting: it references the first name of a person and says they were coming under attack. It also uses some army jargon that seems genuine.
Step 2
I check the Twitter profile of the tweet. It provides me with what looked like the real name of the person tweeting, a profile picture, the town they live in and a profile description which connects them to the US military.
Step 3
I use Google to search for their full name and the town in which they live. This brings up two results on White Pages. One of these is associated with a person who had the same first name as the person mentioned in the original tweet. It looks like I may now have their home address and phone number (I haven't called to check though).
Step 4
I use Google again to search for the full name of the person mentioned in the tweet and find a Linkedin profile that matches the name and location. It also provides a military job title that makes perfect sense in the context of the tweet.
Step 5
I conduct a number of Google searches that include the name of the person mentioned in the tweet, their location and their job title in an attempt to find out more information about where they might be.
This is not so easy, but thanks to a local military historian and an interview with someone else on a military history website I can make a very good guess at the regiment they serve in and where they are currently stationed. I imagine if I hadn't come to this topic cold, I could find more ways to search or, indeed, could make a few useful phone calls at this point...
Step 6
Google again. This time I search for both the name of the person in the tweet and the name of the tweeter. This brings up a profile on the website of a small business.
The "About Us" section has an entry about the tweeter. They are a member of staff. There is a profile picture (the same one used on Twitter), job title and some friendly information about them confirming: that they are married to the person mentioned in the tweet, how long they have been married, the names of their children, their email address and the organisations that they volunteer with in their spare time.
Step 7
I Google (again) the name of an organisation I now know the couple volunteer for. It has a public Facebook page. One scan for the tweeter's first name on that page uncovers comments left by a Facebook profile that the couple share.
Step 8
Clicking on to the couple's Facebook profile reveals that they must have Facebook's recommended privacy settings. This means that all their past profile pictures are publicly visible. So, I now have a lovely family photo to go with the names of the couple and their children.
Step 9
The couple have also been fantastically diligent with linking up with family members on Facebook. This means I now also get to see a list of profiles for the extended family. I learn the maiden name of the wife. It also turns out her mother has no privacy settings on her profile at all – her wall and all her photos are available to browse.
However, at that point, Joanna stops. She writes:
"I've gone from one tweet to knowing an entire family's names, location, address, contact details, what they look like, how they are connected to the military and, potentially, where a part of the US army is coming under fire.
I stop there because I am already completely freaked out by just how far I've already got from a few Google searches.
It's easy to say it's incumbent on the individual to protect their own privacy, but it's hard to see how we can always stop this type of jigsaw identification of people online."
Using social media tools to trace people is not an illegal activity. It is nothing like phone hacking, of course.
Three months ago I did something not too dissimilar to hunt down a former colleague who appeared to have vanished almost 20 years ago.
His name didn't come up on Google or Facebook. The online BT directory was no help. But judicious use of 192.com and further jigsaw work through Ancestry. co.uk came up trumps.
We were both shocked at the moment of initial contact, through a phone call. When we met a couple of weeks ago for the first time since 1992 one of his first questions was: how did you find me?
As Joanna points out, the process does illustrate the difficulty of enforcing that part of the editors' code of practice that is supposed to respect people's right to enjoy their privacy.
And, as she rightly concludes, code or no code, "there are those who would still be interested in using this type of technique for their own purposes and would not feel bound by any ethical code."
It's a further example of the reality of the digital revolution. After all, I seem to recall it was Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg who said the age of privacy is dead.
Source: Joanna Geary
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2011/aug/03/privacy-twitter
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