The rest of the story, what can they find out about you on Facebook

Sorry about the wait, I’ve been meaning to do some more work on this blog, but I am on holiday you know. I can see that lots of people are interested in this so I am going to tell you a bit more about what I found.

The first thing is that when you are logged in to Facebook, at the top of your page you will see a button called Settings and in there one of the options is to edit your privacy settings. Some people obviously don’t know that or don’t know how.

If you set this to only allow your friends to see your records, you will be pretty safe, but if not, then you are pretty transparent.

I entered in a common name by way of a random search. I will not provide all the details, but this will give you an idea of what I found out about this random person who had not set their security settings appropriately, obviously not realising the implications.

This person is a 29 year old atheist. I could see how many friends they have and what their names are. I also found that I could see all the details of several of that persons friends Facebook accounts.

I saw that the person hda been in a relationship until November last year and that they are working in the armed forces and have been in that role for over 10 years.

I was able to see hundreds of photos and all the people in the photos, including some from overseas trips, were tagged with their names and in many cases I had access to their pages.

Reading the Wall to Wall messages I was able to find out about things like their favourite foods and what sort of material they like to read.

I found out what the persons favourite films, books and activities were and the list goes on.

Off course Facebook isn’t he only place where you can get lots of information about people, but it is one of the easiest and you don’t have to have any special skills.

My conclusion is that unless you want your life to be an open book, you really should be sure that you set your security levels carefully. The phenomenon of trust, where people share much more of themselves on facebook than virtually any other social networking application is something that we should all be concerned about.

What can people find out  about you on Facebook? Much more than most people think. It could very easily be abused. It would be very easy for example for unscrupulous advertising companies to find out about your interests and Spam you.

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)

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What can they find out about you on Facebook? Part One

What can they find out about you on Facebook? Plenty. I’ve always been of the opinion that in a country like New Zealand, if you have nothing to hide and you are a law abiding citizen, then there is no real threat. Now I am talking largely in terms of people or organisations watching you for purposes detrimental to your own. I still have that opinion from a New Zealand perspective and as I don’t have anything to hide, I’m not overly cautious, but that doesn’t mean I throw caution to the wind either.

For example, a couple of days ago I get a ‘Friend Request’ from someone I had never heard of, in another country. Now if I get a friend request on Linked In (which I use solely for buiness networking) or MySpace (which I use solely for the purpose of marketing my music) I will accept a friend request from a total stranger, because the information I am sharing on those sites  is information I want to share.

Facebook is different however, because almost every connection I have is with people I personally know, typically family, friends and acquaintances. It is a personal social network and my philosophy there is that my ‘friends’ are people I trust. I am much more open on that page and share photos of what I have been up to etc. I am more relaxed about the information I share as are my fellows.

So back to this week, I received a friend request from someone I had never heard of, from a country I have never been to. Rather than accepting it, I sent them a message asking why they sent me a friend request. I got a response back saying ‘Because I think I like you’. Needless to say I declined the invitation. Now it might have been a genuine reply and given that the person had a band page and appears to be a musician, it may well have been sincere and the liking may have been platonic from the perspective of one musician to another, but the key is that in Facebook I am very cautious about who I accept as friends. I don’t want to have to be too guarded and it is great fun keeping up with friends and family all over the world in a situation of many communicating with many.

This week an in Australia a person got approval from the court to ‘serve’ someone via Facebook. In this case it was people who had defaulted on a $100,000 loan and then dissapeared. They were found on Facebook. It may not be as insidious as it sounds, given that people are normally ‘served’ in newspaper advertisements and precedents have already been made when Sonny Bill Williams decided to walk out of his contract with the Bulldogs Rugby League team in Australia, to go and play in France, he was served by a text message to his mobile phone, but that’s another story.

I’m go to write this blog in two parts, with the 2nd focussing on what they can find out about you, but the first thing is that they can find you. If I want to find anyone that I know reasonably well, or know something about and they have a Facebook account, then I can find them and chances are, if I was a devious person, I could get them to accept me as a friend and give me access to all their Facebook information.

First of all I can search for their name.  If there are lots of people with the same name, I can get more specific. If I know more about them I can search using various criteria. For example I can say I only want results from a certain country. If I know their hobbies or passions, I can search for people with that name, by groups, events or even applications. For example if I know they love cricket, then I can search under applications related to Cricket.

I can search by company (which could be a company they worked for years ago, by school, or by email. Then of course you can search by people you think they might know, because if you know who their friends are, you should be able to find them if you can find their friends.

So now we can find them if they have a Facebook account (and I have only mentioned simple methods) we can find out more about them.

If you want to know more, why not subscribe to my blog so you will know when I post part 2 of this blog. If you know of other people who would be interested, send them a link and if you would like to leave a comment here, I would welcome that too.

To be continued……………………………

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)