NEW YORK--For private investigator Steven Rambam, the Internet is his most valuable tool in helping to find missing persons, cheating husbands, and your competitor's dirty secrets.
But while the intelligence business is booming, individuals are losing the battle to protect their privacy with every blog post, Google Web search, and online photo, Rambam, director of the Pallorium investigative agency, said in a keynote session late on Saturday at the Last HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference.
"Anything you put on the Internet will be grabbed, indexed, cataloged, and out of your control before you know it," he told CNET News after the session. "The genie is out of the bottle. Data doesn't stay in one location. It migrates to hundreds of places."
Information that he used to have to search for or dig up in far away places is now available at his fingertips. All types of information is being digitized, older stuff is being scanned and put online and it's all being aggregated into uber-databases that are being sold to marketers, government agencies, and anyone else who can pay, he said.
Rambam says he searches on social networks to find photos of what people he is researching look like, the first step in any investigation. He gets a lot of other vital data from those sites, like hometown, age, relationship status, school and work history, hobbies, and friends and acquaintances to interview. With Twitter, he can often see where they are right now, or at least in the recent archived past.
"I used to pay the police $500 for a driver's license photo. Now I just have to go to MySpace," he said. "I can find your location without leaving my desk."
He uses job sites to see someone's resume, date of birth, address, and work history, to find former employees of companies he is researching and to see what job openings they have and compare salary levels. And then there are sites like Don'tDateHimGirl.com and Who'sARat.com where you can find what a person's enemies have to say.
Rambam also gets information from marketing databases that gather information on people's buying habits and preferences from frequent customer cards, surveys, product registrations, actual transactions, and other activities.
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