Online Privacy

While we may desire privacy; many expose private details of their lives online. Once you post something, you are leaving a digital footprint that is owned by the site. Facebook has been receiving a lot of bad press because of privacy-related issues. Users fear of how their data might somehow be used in a manner that they deem unacceptable. Privacy Policies and Terms of Service (TOS) are continually being changed and as such we are seeing two different agendas in terms of advocates in online privacy. We put pressure on websites to protect our information, and we do reserve that right. Yet, at the same time because of the vast scope and range of information on social media, the government generally demands a backdoor method to access information for certain types of investigations related to or under the guise of terrorism.
Consider This…

• There are different privacy laws in every country.
• Check TOS and privacy laws on each website. They may allow backdoors.

I. Privacy Settings

It’s Important to understand privacy laws and settings for major social networks to understand limitations, and how to potentially work around them…

Users can select their own privacy settings, and there are few ways to get around them,

• Facebook Profiles Offer
• Phone numbers
• Email addresses
• Photos provide a history and timeline
• Status updates offer current whereabouts etc
• Privacy Settings: Profile can be viewable by
• No one,
• Viewed by everyone,
• Friends of Friends,
• Friends Only

II. Public Tweets:

Your updates appear in Twitter’s public timeline — a flowing river of every member’s status.

• Anyone can see your Twitter updates.
• Your Twitter updates can be indexed by search engines.

III. Protected Tweets:

People will have to request to follow you and each follows request will need approval

• You’re Profile and Tweets will only be visible to users you’ve approved
• Protected Profiles’ Tweets will not appear in Twitter search
• @replies sent to people who aren’t following you will not be seen
• You cannot share static page URL’s with non-followers

IV. Tips & Tricks

If you have an email address you want to put a face to, you can also find who owns an email address by searching the email address in the Facebook search window.

Anyone can create a fake profile so use this to your advantage. Some users will allow friends of friends to access part if not all of a profile. Befriend a friend of someone you are investigating.

How do you get in and see info if it’s been deleted?

• Tweleted allowed you to recover Twitter message

If user a quotes user b who then removes tweet, it will still show up in user a’s quotes.