Whatever anyone puts on social media, it has a way of giving everyone else a second opinion on anything they have said and done. In January Coronation Street reportedly dropped an actress, cast as a 14-year-old, when she took years off her age when applying for the part. Fans of the ITV drama saw the actress was celebrating her 25th birthday on social media.
The official Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) offers good practice guides. Among guides on personnel security is one on use of the internet for ‘employment decisions’.
Since most personal profiles, public records and other people-related documents are stored in databases and not on static web pages, a lot of online information about people is invisible to a regular search engine.
The term ‘deep web’ refers to a vast repository of underlying internet content, such as documents in online databases which general purpose web crawlers cannot reach, such as Pipl. 123people allows the user to search by different countries, collates email addresses, photos, microblogs and Facebook and LinkedIn pages. Zoominfo collates information that relates to business presence of user as does LinkedIn, which is used for networking, sharing CVs. Once you have tried the ‘deep web’, CPNI suggest doing an Advanced Search on any search engine, searching within a timespan. Or, try ‘metasearch engines’ such as Dogpile and Browsys.
