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.