to ask thisisanicecage to repeat her experiment on internet insecurity

[Consils]

she looked up the mumsnet history of a random poster and was able to find out names and addresses. I missed the end of the last thread and I am still curious.

You can find out where I work that way. But if you know my name that's reasonably public any way

If people don't want to be identified they should also be very careful about linking MN and twitter identities as tweets can often contain quite personal information and you don't even need to follow someone to read most feeds.

I was quite shocked recently when I looked at the twitter page of one of my DCs teachers (pure nosiness) and who should show up as a follower but a fairly prolific MNer who tweets under her MN name with her real name as well.

This person may be quite happy for people to know her name but I felt a bit intrusive seeing the two together.

Some friends of DH were getting some particularly vile shit on a forum from some someone with Neo-Nazi views.

It took us about ... oooo 20mins.... to find out where they lived, what they did for their part time job and who their parents were.

Just from their user names.

They stopped the abuse pretty quick. Internet stalking is scarily easy.

DH has also 'hacked' an internet friends FB account, with permission, to prove a point about his password being too insecure (friend had account 'hacked' and was very, very upset about it, and DH wanted to show him how it was done and how easy it was).

He guessed it pretty much from the friend facebook profile alone. So if you have passwords related to pets, partners or your favourite football team or similar interest thats plastered all over the internet, its wise to change it

TraineeBabyCatcher, put your real name in google - assume someone's already worked it out.

Yy, marquesas - people have an MN name, linked to a Twitter name that has a real name, or a facebook link, and then the facebook link has a real name... Plus lots of MNers follow or befriend each other on Twitter/facebook, so that's a huge headstart in matching people up, even when their MN name isn't identical.

What's more, fb now allows people to label you not just as Friend but as Sister, say. So even if your own fb page has reasonable privacy (despite fb's best rule-changing efforts), you can be completely outed by someone else's page. Haven't done much since fb started prompting tags for photos, but honestly, there's no skill in this stalking business anymore. The machines do it for you whether you want them to or not...

I'll volunteer :)
Though I'm easy. Doesn't take much to work out my IRL name and once you have that you'll find loads as I'm one of the few with the name to show up on google. Only one in the UK I'm certain And you'll find loads of info from my reckless youth days of posting all online and the sites refuse to remove it as I don't know login details (I've tried in the past) so I've given up now and still post rough locations and whatnot. I'm not too fussed though, I'm a very open person!

Could you do me? This does scare me.

WOW!! This is fascinating and really troubling.
How many of us assume we are totally anonymous on here?

ThisIsANiceCage I like to think if any of my friends/relations read my posts on here they wouldn't be certain it was me (not that anyone knows about my MN habit) but maybe I should read some of my postings to look at all the giveaway signs.

I'd be very interested to see what info you could get on me if you have the time? perhaps you should charge a fee, you'd rake it in

I wouldn't of thought you could do me from the information I've posted and my MNname would surely bring up lloads of random stuff as it's a saying?

I try to be deliberately obtuse online for a reason. I don't use my real name on anything, not even Facebook.

Among my friends and family I'm jokingly known as an online stalker; I can do pretty much what cage has done here. Back in the days of Myspace people would ask me to 'myspace stalk' someone, usually a crush, so they could find them online. It was much harder back then; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc have made it a thousand times easier.

Does anyone want to do a 'stalker swap'. Kind of I'll stalk you, you stalk me, and see how much we can find out about each other?

Ooh, a stalker swap is a good idea, SparklingPerry. And you'd find out how easy it is.

I would feel bad about encouraging this, but let's face it, a malicious stalker doesn't need encouraging, they'll do it anyway.

Uff. I'd forgotten how much faff it was namechanging to ThisIsANiceCage.

Wait a mo.

That's better.

IIRC ThisIsANiceCage has access to things that are publicly available but you have to pay for.

So a casual stalker would have trouble getting as far as she did.

It also takes her quite a long time so please don't all ask to be stalked!

Do me, do me! I'm overseas at mo so feel invincible which is mental really as its a much smaller pool

I have made millions of posts - most of them drivel - under numerous variations of this name.

If anyone can wade through all of that and piece RL me together, I will just hand them my bank card and PIN

I'm a bit freaked out. I know I'm easily recognisable. I'm cool with that.

However, I just googled my name. My married name comes up with 25 pages, mostly of me. Fine, nothing untoward. However, I googled my maiden name, which is very unusual. Whenever I've checked before there aren't any others in the world. It would be odd to be honest if there were. I came across a facebook page, of someone with the same name. No details viewable at all (not even friends list, which is odd) but the picture is a bit hazy, not of me, but someone who could easily pass as me. Freaky or suspicious?

Yes, I have a subscription to something I use for family history, and then there was some pay-per-view stuff at about a tenner a throw.

Oh the other hand, there's a proliferation of "people search engines". IIUC, these do exactly what it says on the tin: search the web for your name and aggregate the results. The one I'm looking at right now uses the headings:

Background Search
Twitter
LinkedIn
Facebook
MySpace
Flickr Profiles
Blogger
Classmates
Foursquare
Amazon Wishlists
Real estate
Google
Bing
News
Blogs
Images
Flickr
YouTube
Facts
Email addresses
Documents
Tags
Phone numbers

It will also list "related people", which I suppose might be people tagged as relatives on fb, or might be people identified as being at the same address.

As StuntGirl and RedToothbrush have said, cyberstalking is incredibly easy now.

Gosh, LoopsInHoops, sorry I've no idea about that. Is there some sort of reporting mechanism to fb?

Wow, I just searched my history and I'm really easy to work out, that's quite scary.

Hecate, I might not need your PIN if I already had your full name, address, telephone number, birth date, mother's maiden name, name of first school you attended and names of children/pets.

All of which may be available online.

MNHQ are quite good at deleting individual posts for privacy reasons, if you ask Skivvytomany.

And that's another thing.

MNHQ are, IME, on our side in this.

But lots of sites aren't. In fact, some sites/companies exist primarily as data collectors - which is why they ask you to "register free, just fill in this form with your name, address, dob, etc" before using them.

This is what Bounty are doing in maternity hospitals (the photos are just an additional revenue stream), and this is what facebook is doing.

There's now a saying, "If you aren't paying for the product, you are the product." Welcome to the information economy...

I do think FB is particularly bad when it comes to being able to glean information about someone.

People think you are being paranoid when you say stuff about 'no photos' but I do think that tagging is just about the worst thing when it comes to being able to track people you may be acquainted with (particularly with mutual friends).

I think a very real lack of understanding of how this information can be used is alarming and worrying.

(and yeah this is partly why I'm so angry and annoyed about Bounty and trying to make an effort to change that at the moment... and particularly annoyed the the one FOI response I've had from a hospital trust failed to recognise that collecting data for third parties was a commercial practice and they actually hadn't done any formal review of procedures. The total lack of safeguarding they are doing for patients appears, like it could be staggering. Part of the problem with Bounty of course, being that they have been in hospitals so long and have such a close relationship that they have always been 'trusted' and how this data is now used has changed in just how much it is now valued. But thats a whole different thread... thats still going on.)

I know.

My point was that someone would die of old age by the time they waded through the piles of crap to get to all that. In my case.