Technology

Missing Person Investigations for a New Era

George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was first published in 1949. You would have thought his vision would no longer be up to date 65 years later. The world he described was a world where Big Brother watched the people, constantly looking for information about crimes, thoughts or any other type of offense against the glorious super state of Oceania.

Edward Snowden showed us that what the Big Brothers are doing these days is not that different from what Orwell described. Sure, technology is quite different from what I had imagined, but Orwell’s novel is not about science and technology, but about the horrible world where governments can monitor our every move, watch us in our most intimate moments, and know everything. what we do. Supercomputers, satellites, and all kinds of technology today make it easily possible for various government agencies.

Yet there is so much information that can be easily accessed without the need for spy satellites, supercomputers or tapped mobile phones. It’s the information that millions of users are putting online every day of their own free will, just to get a few likes, retweets, or shares. People tell themselves they’re doing this to stay in touch, but they don’t realize how much personal information they’re giving away at every moment of every day.

With more than half of Australians active on Facebook, it seems that this would be the most promising social network to launch an investigation. The information found on Facebook is really varied. There are photographs, comments, and records that reveal a person’s current location. Plus, there’s a timestamp on everything, making it easy to create a collage of events a person went through at a particular time. No special equipment is needed for all of this, and much of it can be done with a simple smartphone.

Of course, people tend to forget that social media isn’t just Facebook and Twitter. In addition to other well-known names like LinkedIn, Google+, or Pinterest, there are dozens of other smaller niche websites that cater to all kinds of profiles. Finding information on all of these platforms can become a lot of research on its own.

Researching social media isn’t just about snooping, either. People tend to forget that Facebook is first and foremost a communication platform. As many of the younger generations don’t even have a landline anymore and choose not to publicly disclose their mobile phone number, Facebook and other social networks can be an easy way to track them down to communicate or even deliver court documents.

Being a private investigator and not knowing anything about social media is something that has become unimaginable today. While traditional methods such as surveillance remain highly effective, they are considerably supplemented by comprehensive desktop investigation based on extensive social media profiling and, as the next generation spends more of their lives to the Internet, the value of this type of profiling will only increase. .

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