Social media.. Your privacy going down the drain.
I focused in on my last post, about how Friendfeed could be a great resource for spammers. Delving further into the subject, it got me thinking. With Friendfeed becoming a social bank of information, it would be an ideal tool for private investigators, law enforcement, debt collectors and so forth. We are so quick to be active contributors to social media, the majority of us, sadly do not sit back and think about the implications of how our digital footprints can be used against us.
What most of us do on sites like Friendfeed, Myspace, Facebook etc, can be classified as a type of life-streaming activity. Life-streaming is a continual broadcast of events in a person’s life through digital media. Friendfeed is one of the platforms that facilitates the process. Friendfeed takes it a step further. It added the community aspect to life-streaming, something the competitors in the space, such as Socialthing & Profilactic were late to figure out.
Friendfeed allows one to add a multitude of services to compose their life-stream. You can broadcast your online status, your favorite music, videos, images, bookmarks. Location-based social networking, such as Brightkite takes it a step a further, and allow one to broadcast your location in real time, tracking not only you, but your networks of friends and family as well.You are archiving and broadcasting these activities simultaneously in real time, leaving a traceable, easily accessible digital profile behind in the background. There is not much we can do about that. This is a small price we all pay using social media online. We all have done Google queries on our names at some point. We find hundreds, some several thousand pages of archived public, life-stream data. This data is accessible to any person, corporation, and even law enforcement entity.
Most private investigators and law enforcement use search engines as their primary source for fact finding information. Circumstances permitting, they would use social media as a second avenue for investigative research. Think about how beneficial the information an individuals lifestreaming feed could be . An instant profile can be created of the target. This profile could contain an individual’s photos, websites, comment postings (with time stamps), music play lists, tweets, employment and business affiliations etc. The scope of the profile and data will vary based on how active the target is, and what social media applications they use.
Friendfeed being the main hub for all these services to plug into, makes it the ideal one stop shop to monitor and profile a target’s activities. Private investigators, and cyber sleuths would have a field day monitoring sites like Friendfeed. They could easily monitor a potential cheating husband or wife’s daily whereabouts, twitter conversations, etc. This all can be done from the comfort of Google Reader, by simply importing the targets Friendfeed RSS feed. Law enforcement is one example, there is a whole slew of industries who can and are using an individuals life-streaming activities to track them down for whatever reason. I am not blogging about anything new. It’s common knowledge for most of us that everything we do online is logged, archived and stored somewhere. The question is, have we become to complacent on what we broadcast online? What are your thoughts on the negative ramifications of life-streaming and how it can be used against you?
Related reads:
Who needs Carnivore when you have lifestreams.
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As for private investigators the couple that I know their typical searches go:
Facebook
Myspace
Google
government databases that are freely available