An Interesting New Concept (Criminals & those OTR be aware.)

[Th0r]

Several things I've read recently caused me to think about this.

Firstly I read about the story of Belle De Jour, a blogger whose work was the inspiration for several TV series. Belle De Jour was a prostitute who was revealed to be a thirty-something PhD holding research scientist.

Back in the days where blogs were few and far between and there were literally only a thousand or so bloggers, two of whom were Dr. Brooke Magnanti (Later revealed to be Belle De Jour) and Belle De Jour. Another blogger who I can't remember the name of read both the blogs of Dr. Magnanti and Ms. De Jour and suspected the two might be the same person.

He set up a webpage which contained both the names of Brooke Magnanti and Belle De Jour and of course he would be able to see whether anyone Googled the phrases Brooke Magnanti and Belle De Jour together.

He was then able to log the IP's of those who searched the two phrases together and of course alert Dr. Magnanti.

The next concerns the story of Patrick McDermott, the boyfriend of 'Grease' star Olivia Newton-John.

He disappeared and was presumed drowned, but there were motivations for his disappearance which prompted as well as sightings of him which prompted investigators to hatch a plan.

They set up a web page which could be reached by Google and logged and tracked the IP addresses that visited the page.

Sure enough, it paid off because in January of this year they announced he was alive and well.

If you're a criminal 'On The Run', or OTR and you Google your name you have no idea whether what looks like a legitimate news article is a legitimate article or a trap designed to capture your IP address.

[xannex]

Thanks for posting this. It reminds me of the way that law enforcement is starting to use social networking sites like myspace and facebook to prosecute people.

[odin_dax]

It's best just to be private and use privacy settings online. Don't let non-friends be able to view your profile, don't let people at work see your photos, etc. Too many people don't get hired or fired over the their Myspace and Facebook pages. Hell, there was a news story the other day about a woman losing her insurance policy because of her photos.

[bankraped]

Funny thing bout the case of that woman who's insurer dropped her.
Her Facebook Profile was set on private.

[Æhµ]

Good post, I remember reading about the Patrick McDermott case.

Anyone running a website that can access their logs (ruling out the free hosts) can see what google search phrases were used that led people to their site (assuming, of course, they've allowed google to index them and google has crawled their site). So if I were to say, type into google a very specific search phrase, and one of the search results were from Rorta, and then were to click on that link, Rorta's referral log will indicate that I came from google and what my search string was. If it was a fairly general search string it wouldn't stand out, BUT, as Th0r's post indicates, if it's a specific search that might indicate some familiarity with the topic.

I suppose it's human nature to want to google yourself, more-so if you are on the lam, as a means of seeing what they have on you.

[Th0r]

Funny thing bout the case of that woman who's insurer dropped her.
Her Facebook Profile was set on private.

What's the bet her Facebook was private, BUT she was part of a network which allowed others in the network to view her profile?

It's a very basic security exploit which a large portion of users allow themselves open too.