People Search

Today we had to make a presentation about the research we conducted on another student. The student I had to research was not 'invisible' per-say, but I had to make a lot of assumptions. For my research I started where everyone else did, the appstate directory. Where I found his middle name, and email. From there I went to facebook, where I found his facebook.. but most information was private.

After a few google searches I found a man with the same last name, which had listed an address, phone number and people living in the household. On a hunch, I went back to facebook and went to my partners friends list. There were people with all of the names of the man I found by google search.

I remembered seeing my partner's profile picture, which had a dog that he identified as his sister's dog. After searching pictures of the people in that household I found the dog. I discerned that that girl was his sister, she had a picture of a man saying happy father's day. From there I had found his sister and father. I went to his father's facebook page and found his mother from that. From his mother's facebook page I found his other sister.

I also learned that I had a lot more on facebook than I had originally thought, most of it is now hidden of course. My life events and certain pictures were shown as public, even though most the rest of my profile was private. I went back and changed all of that to only show what I do not mind people seeing. Though I was not too upset about anything he found, other than my phone number which was not on facebook.

To my surprise, he was not able to find any of my family besides my fiance (which is openly listed on facebook) and the first name of my niece. So, if I had edited my facebook page better.. I would have been as well hidden as he was.

Most of all, I learned that I have some pretty impressive facebook stalking skills. Which is probably not a good thing.

Final Paper

There were a variety of different final paper topics chosen and talked about today. I chose to do my final paper on cyberbullying, specifically the laws and legislation put into place to solve cyberbullying and possibly the cases that led to that legislation or law.

Cyberbullying is defined as "The act of harassing someone online by sending or posting mean messages, usually anonymously." Over half of adolescents have been victims of cyberbullying, almost the same have taken part in cyberbullying.

Cyberbullying can lead to violence, feelings of depression, and in some cases suicide. Cyberbullying is a growing problem, and with that growing problem laws and legislation soon follow.

Though this blog is going to take a slight change of topic to something that has been bothering me. Recently I was enlightened to an example of cyberbullying that is happened at ASU currently. But this time it is not children and teens, but adults. A site dedicated to bashing one of our professors with comments about another.

The point here is that no-one is immune to cyberbullying, not even adults. Even as a joke, sites like that are unacceptable and degrading. While teenagers are more susceptible to their emotions and less likely to seek help, the emotional effects of being bullied carry the same for adults as well.



Sources: http://www.bullyingstatistics.org/content/cyber-bullying-statistics.html

Network Communications

Yesterday the topic was Network Communications, where everyone in the class brought in an article and summarized it. As usual, I went last.

My topic was internet addiction. At this time, internet addiction is not classified as an actual illness. Studies show that 1 in 8 Americans are addicted to the internet. Though up to 30% of the population in China, Korea, and Taiwan are said to be addicted to the internet.

National surveys suggest that over 50% of the people who suffer from internet addiction also suffer form another addiction - drugs, alcohol, smoking, sex. Symptoms of internet addiction include; compulsive use of the Internet, a preoccupation with being online, lying or hiding the extent or nature of your online behavior, and an inability to control or curb your online behavior.

There are different types of internet addiction. Those types include: starting with the most common - cybersex and cyberporn at 60% of internet addicts, and multi-user online roleplaying games as the fastest growing group. There are treatment options for internet addiction, regardless of the type. These include inpatient, outpatient and after-care support as well as self-help groups.

Other topics that were brought to attention in class were: facebook likes being protected under the first amendment, china controlling blog content and making users register, facebook graph search, and child controls on youtube.


Sources: http://netaddiction.com/faqs/