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Ask HN: Do you use your hacker skills to be 'creepy'?
2 points by juiceandjuice on Dec 16, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments
These "creepy" Assange emails got me thinking.

I'm sure most or all of us are experts at using google, web scraping skills, and knowledge about online habits to find nearly anything about anyone online. I'm more than guilty at doing this.

Most people would find this creepy, and even an invasion of their privacy in and of itself, no matter how easy it is using publicly accessible data, they'd probably even call it stalking.

As an example, I've been able to find out almost everything about people on okcupid just by unique enough words, or even the sequence of words, they've had in their profiles using smart guesstimates about online habits and usually physical location. On some level, I used these same skills to get the job I have now (knowing your audience is a huge advantage when writing a cover letter)

Do you do this? Do you ever refrain/limit yourself from doing it (Is ignorance bliss?) How far have you gone/typically go?



I do when I need/want to find out more about a person of interest.


another fun thing to do is to look at exif data in jpegs. :-)




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