Social Media Investigations has been known to take an unbelievable amount of your time or that of an employee. Facebook searching is one of the areas that can be the most confusing but can harvest some of the best results. Either way, it can cost you money and you may not even reap the rewards of the time spent.

A good Social Media Investigation Strategy begins with a thorough understanding of each of the platforms you are using in your research. “You don’t know what you don’t know”, sort of thing. 2019 will be the year that goes down in history as the year of privacy, which makes social media investigations even more difficult, but not impossible.

One of the very first things to take a look at when beginning to use a social platform for search purposes, is their privacy settings. This way you know ahead of time exactly what you are up against. In this post, we are going to go over two privacy areas that often get overlooked.

Facebook Minor Privacy

Minor privacy in Facebook is taken very seriously, as it should. Take a look at the privacy clearly stated in Facebook:

While searching for a Minor in Facebook is allowed, you may not be privy to the type of information you are looking for. Today’s Tweens and Teens are very good at hiding in social media, which makes our jobs even harder.

Facebook General Privacy

Who can look you up using the phone number provided?

This is quite specific and one you may not have even realized existed. When we think about privacy settings, we think about a few questions to answer and it’s done! Not so with Facebook as you can see. This is where a lot of confusion can come in when it comes to mining social media. Any person may have certain aspects of their profile public, while others are set to private.

Do you want search engines outside of Facebook to link to your profile?

Can’t find the social media profile in a Google search? This may be the reason why. Searching in Facebook is key to overcome this setting. Search in a number of ways – think outside the box.

So, how do you know if your person of interest has these privacy settings in place ? You won’t ever know. You just have to find ways to work around it.

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