BREWED February 2015 | Page 45

This day and age we are living in a world that is mostly connected by the internet. We spend quite a bit of time on social networks every day, and we browse the internet for additional hours. We make use of a lot of services on the web that require us to have an account that we have to log in to. Even though it is great to be able to do so much from the comfort of your PC, laptop or mobile phone, there is a major downside to all of this. Our on-line footprint. The online footprint means the data you personally leave behind on the internet. “The more use you make of the internet, the more data you will leave behind”. This goes from online mailboxes to social networks and a forum where you posted once under your real name. All of this can be traced, some things harder are harder to find than others. Using an alias online does of course limit the possibilities of someone finding you. However, there are also plenty of things to find out when you only have an IP address or a phone-number. Point being, you should always be weary of what it is that you put up on the world wide web, before you know it, it will be out there for ever, and for everyone to find. Might you, however be interested in finding someone using the internet, using the information you know of them, then I will give you some websites that make the finding that much easier. Facebook (or any other form of social media), Through the use of the search function used by Facebook, you can already find out most of the things that you could possibly want to know. Some people are quite careless and leave almost all the information that could lead to identity-theft on there. One could even run an analysis on a certain person (that you would have to do yourself), to find out what a person is like using social media. Google, of course, can lead you to a treasure chest of information, because it does not just look at one social media platfo ɴ