Identify Analyses Profiles Across Social Networking Sites

Martin — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 17:25:17 +0000

Identify is a Firefox extension that can be used to retrieve information about individuals on social networking sites. It works by visiting a profile page on a site and pressing the [alt i] keyboard shortcut to open the Identify overlay. Mac users press [ctrl i] for the same effect. The Firefox add-on will then display a stylish overlay containing various information about the selected individual including – if available – a link to the homepage, a short about me paragraph and links to other social networking and media sites that the individual has accounts at.

Below is a screenshot of how the information are displayed in the web browser. Example of Identify showing Sarah Perez’s information.

The developer does not provide extensive information about how the Identify add-on calculates the data except for the following short sentences found on the project page:

It makes extensive use of Google?s Social Graph API to find out about which sites an individual has profiles on and then uses YQL API to collect the information.

It can obviously only be executed on supported sites. The usual suspects like Twitter, Digg, Flickr or Friendfeed seem all to be supported by the add-on while sites like Ghacks are not. A link is provided for each identified profile on another service making it very easy to follow the trail of the individual.

Tags: digg, firefox, firefox-add on, firefox-extension, flickr, friendfeed, identify, twitter

Used Hard Drives Still Haven For Identify Theft

Martin — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 15:02:17 +0000

Sellers are currently offering 3807 used hard drives on eBay.com alone. Add 5303 used desktop PCs, 975 Apple Desktops and thousands of other used devices like digital cameras or mobile phones that might contain data that has not been properly deleted by its previous owner. According to Techradar 66% of the used hard drives were not properly erased and contained personal data from the previous owner. It’s hard to pinpoint the validity of the number because the article fails to mention the amount of hard drives that have been tested.

The figure means that 66 used hard drives out of 100 sold would contain data data about the previous owner. Half of that number would still mean that every third used hard drive sold would contain personal data. The figures seem to grow worth instead of better with every passing year. Researchers seem to concentrate on hard drives but digital cameras or mobile phones might reveal the same amount of information including personal pictures, documents, contacts and even credit card or bank account information.

How can users protect themselves and their data? The easiest way would be to stop selling used hardware that contained data at one point. That solution is not always practicable though.

The user should make sure to make the data on the storage device unrecoverable. One of the best tools for that purpose is Eraser which can be used to clear the free disk space so that the files “underneath” cannot be recovered with file recovery software anymore.

Any tips that you might want to add? Let me know.

Tags: data theft, ebay, hard-drives, identify, identity theft, most recently used, used hard drives

gHacks technology news » identify

Identify Analyses Profiles Across Social Networking Sites

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Used Hard Drives Still Haven For Identify Theft

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