I will take my future into my own hands and shape it according to my own high standards, never again feeling like a slave to the claustrophobic, monotonous nightmare of high school.

“It’s pretty hard to live when someone steals your identity and cleans out your bank account.”

If I so desired, I could ruin your life. It’s not even difficult, either. If you provide me with an active internet connection and thirty minutes, there’s almost nothing that I can’t find. Technology is invasive, silently leaking its cold, metallic syrup into the cracks of our lives while we remain blissfully unaware of the consequences.

First thing’s first: Choose your mark. This target of electronic molestation, ideally, maintains a regular online presence on at least one social network. If this isn’t the case, though, don’t worry. It will take a little bit more time and utilization of more advanced techniques, but invading their sacred privacy is still relatively simple. A good first start is to remember that any Google search result page contains a treasure-trove of information, as long you know how to navigate its (often obtuse) pathways.

Now that you’ve acquired a potential victim, it’s time to do your homework. Do they have a Facebook page? A Myspace page? Twitter? Photobucket? Youtube? What forums do they post on? A quick Google search for their name will reveal a lot, but probably not everything. If all that you know is their name, locate them on Facebook and Myspace. Scan their pages for any information. Facebook has strict privacy options, so it’s possible that you’ll be unable to glean any immediately useful information, but remember that all information is valuable if you know how to use it properly.

Let’s examine some of the information available via a standard non-friend Facebook profile. By clicking on a random person’s profile, I can see her birth date, hometown, groups that she’s a member of, all of her photos and any photo that she’s been tagged in by friends, her entire friends list, and her comment wall. All of this is useful, but the greatest information mine, by far, is the comment wall. From there, I can follow conversations and status updates to access (hopefully) everything I need. On the comment wall I find someone’s cell phone number with a message “Call me and we’ll hang out again!” I make a note of it, as well as the commenter’s profile, and continue on.

From here we have a decent amount of information. Doing a few more Google searches reveals the school that she graduated from, as well as the year. I cross-reference other names in her class with her Facebook friends list and come up with fifteen concurrent matches. A few minutes spent investigating their Facebook pages reveals four more cell phone numbers (Don’t these people know it’s dangerous to post personal information publicly like this? Sheesh!). 
