How to: search for information within social networking sites

In that time I was able to find the mobile number of a 15-year-old girl in South London, the address where a 17-year-old waitress is employed in Kent and the email address and salary of an Accenture employee.

While the debate about how best to protect people from identity theft has intensified with the rapid growth in popularity of social networking, these kind of privacy blunders still litter sites such as Bebo.com, Myspace.com and Facebook.

As journalists increasingly turn to social networks for case studies, background and insight from people involved in high-profile events such as the Virginia Tech shootings, the debate about what material should and should not be exploited has intensified.

In the UK, this debate will intensify further next week when the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) reveals the results of its investigation into social networking sites at an event it is sponsoring about online privacy.

Senior figures from the UK's Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) will also be speaking at this forum.

To coincide with this event Journalism.co.uk has decided to stimulate further debate about privacy and access to information by describing here advanced techniques journalists can use to mine for sources, contacts, case studies and other material in social networks.

These tactics do make it easier to focus your research for quicker results and more relevant material (I explore those tactics below) and although perfectly legal, related techniques can make it much easier for people to target vulnerable groups and individuals and to scour social network profiles for sensitive personal information.

Journalism.co.uk has described those more controversial techniques in correspondence to the PCC and the ICO.

We think it is important for the main stakeholders in this debate to be aware how easy it is to obtain personal information so that steps can be taken to help users protect themselves.

Advanced Search Strings
Most people assume that the best way to search for information is to use the social networking sites' own search tools. Used carefully, however, Google is far more effective.

This technique uses search 'advanced operators' which are used in your search string to limit your results in specific ways. For example, the 'site' operator is typed into Google's search field like this:

site:

Add a domain to that operator directly after the colon and your search is limited to pages from a specific domain. For example, this search string:

site:www.myspace.com London

will limit your search only to pages on Myspace that contain the term 'London'.

Similarly, the 'url' operator will limit your search only to pages that have a URL that contains a specific term. For more information about 'advanced operators' see our how to on precision surfing.

Using these Google 'advanced operators', you can limit your search to target open social network profiles that contain specific terms. This page explores how this technique can be used for research in Myspace and Bebo.

MySpace
Myspace profiles always contain specific terms in their URLs. For example:

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=xxxxx

You can use terms such as 'fuseaction' and 'viewprofile' combined with Google advanced operators to search only for Myspace profiles.

For example, this search term used in Google:

site:www.myspace.com inurl:fuseaction

returned 16 million hits in May 2008. This search term:

site:www.myspace.com inurl:myspace inurl:fuseaction

returned 44 million.

The key to using this technique successfully is to select other relevant search terms to pinpoint relevant profiles. For example, imagine you are looking for case studies involved in a tiny minority sport such as 'bog snorkelling'.

If we enter that term in the myspace.com search field and search in 'people' there are no hits. But this search string used in Google:

site:myspace.com inurl:myspace inurl:fuseaction "bog snorkelling"

returns 120:

And many of these hits include profiles of people who are active bog snorkellers.

You can also identify Myspace users geographically by including town or place names. Search for the term 'Colchester' in the Myspace search field and you get roughly 20 hits. Use this term in Google:

site:myspace.com inurl:myspace inurl:fuseaction colchester

and you get 58,000 hits with far more of those from people who state their location as 'Colchester'. You can limit your search still further by adding more search terms like this:

site:myspace.com inurl:myspace inurl:fuseaction colchester "colchester general"

for references to the local hospital and profiles of people who work there. A search for 'Colchester general' and 'Colchester General Hospital' in the Myspace search field returns no hits.

Looking for employees from a specific company? Try a search such as:

site:myspace.com inurl:myspace inurl:fuseaction accenture

That search returns more than 500 references in Myspace profiles to Accenture and many of those are Accenture employees. Try searching for 'Accenture' in Myspace and you only get three hits.

Bebo.com
As with Myspace, Bebo.com profiles appear to always include specific terms such as 'profile' and 'memberid'. In May, this search term:

site:.bebo.com inurl:memberid inurl:bebo

returned nearly 3 million hits.

If you want to find someone who works for Pfizer, that company name used as a term in Bebo's search field returns 85 hits searching for 'people'. But this search string used in Google:

site:.bebo.com inurl:profile inurl:bebo Pfizer

returns more than 900 hits. Many of those hits are from people directly employed by Pfizer.

Imagine you are looking for sources on the issue of 'tomb stoning' which has sparked so many headlines recently. Search for 'tomb stoning' in Bebo and it returns three hits. But this search in Google:

site:.bebo.com inurl:profile inurl:bebo "tomb-stoning"

returns 30 hits.

Similarly, if you are doing research on the fury caused by pro-anorexia sites on the web then you will find only a handful of 'pro-ana' or 'pro-anorexia' references using Bebo's search tool. But more than 170 Bebo pages can be found in Google using this search string:

site:.bebo.com inurl:profile inurl:bebo "pro-ana".

Privacy issues
Despite the warnings from usability experts such as User Vision that social networks such as Bebo.com, Myspace.com and Facebook privacy controls are too weak and confusing, the sites are clearly failing to tackle the issue.

In looking at tactics to mine information from social networks, we have found several ways to discover sensitive information from many profiles with little effort using just simple tactics.

Despite these vulnerabilities, User Vision's strategic director, Emma Kirk, told us that, because the sites' privacy advice pages are so buried, it is likely that the vast majority of people do not access them.

She wants to see far more emphasis put on privacy advice and control and for that to be targeted at young people in particular.

Journalism.co.uk will keep you up-to-date with our correspondence with the PCC and ICO.