Mind your data
A little lesson in why you should consider the implications of personal information online, and just how much you can find out about someone with just a few minutes trawling of publicly available information.
Earlier in the week there was a little press fluff about a customer being offended and blowing it up into a public news item, when a Sainsbury's the check-out assistant refused to serve her until she finished her call on her mobile 'phone. Even had the cashier been in the wrong - and I don't believe, from what we know, that she was - the customer over-reacted: she made a complaint to the Customer Services desk, and went to grab some limelight in the press. (She must have done - it has been reported and she has posed all dolled up for press photographers in front of the store, and you can bet Sainsburys did not publicise it.) The story as told in the papers implies her complaint must have been pretty strident, because not only have Sainsbury's publicly apologised, they also offered her free vouchers. It appears she has since piped up again, and the fact she went to the papers at all and posed for them might lead to the conclusion she was out to capitalise on this brief spark of interest for some fame, and if lucky, fortune, so I figure that since she wants the attention, she's set herself up as a perfectly legitimate didactic subject.
So let's find out a little about this young woman, shall we, and give her her few minutes of fame? (I hesitate to say "lady" given the ill manners and beligerence she seems to have demonstrated.)
From majority of reports we know her name to be Jo Clarke, that she is 26, and styles herself as a "property manager". The local online story referenced above goes one step further and specifies where she lives: Alfriston Close, Crayford. That's already some basic information, before we even start looking.
Searching for her name alone there are a lot of hits, but nothing which immediately leaps out (other than photos from the media). If we go to a popular professional site, there she is bold as brass, working for a company called "DTZ" since late 2008, and she worked as a PA elsewhere before that. You can see it is her - the photo is the same woman as in the media pictures, albeit rather less preened. Given the working years, it is a pretty fair bet she didn't hit university, especially since she also doesn't claim it amongst her qualifications. (Actually, she doesn't appear to claim very much at all, except a trade diploma earned in the last couple of years.) Following the company further we find that it appears to be a large contract facilities management company with literally thousands of employees, so we are dealing with one very tiny cog in a much larger wheel. Quite what the title "property manager" encompasses in this context I am not sure, but my own suspicion is that it is not quite so grand as she would like the world to believe. Of course that could be wrong.
OK, let's do a search on "alfriston close" "crayford" and see what comes up? This should give us a post code. And there we are, first hit. A property site, listing the road, each property, and the post code: DA1 3RU. As a bonus, we also know there are only 15 properties total with that address, and dates of last sale (which will come in useful later if, for instance, we want to cross-reference viable dates of occupancy). With that small number of properties it is not inconceivable to mount a search against each individual address in turn.
Next search, then, is "Clarke" "DA1 3RU". In this instance we don't get an easy hit, but not to worry. Some of the information sources hinted at will still be useful if we choose to go for the real hunt. The simplest direct approach hasn't yielded much of immediate value, so now we move on to broader information sources, using the free services of a number of online people search sites. On one well-known directory site we instantly find that Joanne G Clarke lived, according to electoral registrations between 2005 and 2006, with 2 or 3 other people (looking, by their ages, to be parents and possibly a brother, although that last hit could purely be coincidental and a different address altogether) at one of those 14 addresses. Oddly none of them seem to have stayed on the register, but it seems unlikely that there would be two Joanne Clarkes of the same age in the same street, and the years do correspond with our subject reaching voting age. The information is not absolute, but it is not inconsistent. So it seems likely our would-be high flying "property manager" is actually still living under her parents' roof.
Now, we still don't have a door number or a date of birth, and I'm not going to pursue either. Quite often both these things are very easy to obtain, particularly if the person being investigated is or was a company director at their current address, by combining information from multiples sources. There is probably plenty more meat to be had of these bones, yet, but Ms. Clarke has had enough attention for a while.
I think I have demonstrated very clearly just how much you can discover about a person just from free sources of information on the web with just a few superficial searches, and without digging into other public records like telephone directories, scraping the infamous Facebook, following discussion forum posts, performing photo searches, following up on all fellow residents, or any number of other methods of generating, cross-referencing, and eliminating the false leads. The bottom line is "be careful where you leave your information".
And for anyone wondering why I would know how to go to the bother, the answer is simple: in order to know how to keep your information safe, one first needs to know how it might be revealed. And no, I have not been particularly careful the last few years, but at least I know it. Do you?
