Facebook n00b here, & I needs guidance... (Remember the guy who shot up the laptop?...)
February 12, 2012 6:35 AM   Subscribe

The guy who shot up his daughter's laptop - how did he figure out what she had posted? (Facebook n00b questions/potential stalkerish questions within)...

Hello

Facebook n00b here...

by now you will have seen the video where the guy found his daughter's facebook posts, whining about her parents and her life, so he shot up her laptop. The guy indicated she set the page so that he parents wouldn't have access but he, working in IT, got to it anyhow.

Now:

1. How does Facebook work? if I create a page, can I choose who does and does not see it? or who does and does not see portions of it, like specific comments & photos?

2. How did this guy probably figure out what was going on? Keylogger, checking the browser cache, listening in on the WiFi data exchanges?

3. Suppose my kid creates a facebook page. It is possible, isn't it, that the page could be set up so that it does not even show up on Google or Facebook searches?

4. in that case, how do I track what my kid does on Facebook, say at school? If my kid interacts with her page at school, and I have no access to that PC, and if she sets it up so I cannot even find the page with Google, what then?
posted by thermonuclear.jive.turkey to Computers & Internet (10 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
He had worked on it the day before the video. The most likely thing is that she simply didn't log out before he did. Or else, he made a dummy account and asked to be her friend and she accepted. You can set your permissions up such that only certain people can see certain posts. So she was still friends with her parents but thought she was being clever by posting statuses that she didnt want them to see to her "friends only" group.
posted by dawkins_7 at 6:49 AM on February 12, 2012


Apparently, the family dog also had an account, which the daughter friended, but didn't add to the family filter. Someone in the family left the dog's account logged in on a shared computer. Parent saw daughter's post on the dog's account. Or, so the story goes.
posted by kellyblah at 6:50 AM on February 12, 2012 [2 favorites]


1. Yes, Facebook has very extensive privacy settings. You can set every single photo/status update to only be viewed by certain people (in groups).
However, there are always loopholes, the greatest being human error.

In this case, it appears that the family dog had an account, which Dad had access to, but daughter had forgotten to mark Fido as one of the accounts that was limited in viewing her account.

2. See above.

3. Yes, your kid's Facebook page could be set up so that it is not indexable by Google or Facebook searches. However, this isn't foolproof. One friend, one screenshot, and it essentially exists forever.

3 + 4. Some families deal with this by having a password rule -- parent has all of kid's passwords (email, Facebook, etc.) (There was a reason AskMe post about how to handle this.)

However, it won't take kid long to set up a secret account and use the one that parent has access to as a fake. That is, if s/he wanted to.
posted by k8t at 7:00 AM on February 12, 2012


1. Yes, you can choose who does or doesn't see any specific post or photo.
2. There are a few theories. The claim is that the family pet account wasn't restricted in the way family accounts were (my sister, for instance, restricted family from seeing stuff but not my best friend, so I found out about things that she didn't intend me to know about), but some kind of spyware or fake friend or password guessing are all possible.
3. Yes, it's possible to block your name from showing up on facebook searches for your name. Or it used to be. In any case, your kid could create an account for Kiddo JT instead of Kiddo Jive-Turkey. You can sometimes find people that way if they show up on other friends pages.
4. What is the concern here?
posted by jeather at 7:01 AM on February 12, 2012


1. How does Facebook work? if I create a page, can I choose who does and does not see it? or who does and does not see portions of it, like specific comments & photos?

This is sort of a general note, but is worth repeating about, say, every 30 seconds of every day - Don't say anything on the internet that you wouldn't shout on out on the street for all to hear. The likelihood of it coming back to you is very high, no matter how well you think you have covered your tracks. And as a self described "Facebook n00b", you are at an even higher risk.

Facebook can be fun, but just realize that no matter what privacy safeguards are in place, there is always the chance your posting, although intended to be private, will get past that setting. Something as simple as another person re-posting your comment defeats the protections you put in place for yourself. Even if FB restricts a reposting to a restricted set, a person can copy your text, and re-paste it in their wall and attribute it to you and then you have to answer for it. In the case of this girl, I actually believe the "dog snitch" story. It is a classic example of how careful one has to be.

I am not so crazy about the Dad's solution, but that is for a completely different post.
posted by lampshade at 7:10 AM on February 12, 2012 [5 favorites]


The daughter blocked her parents and other family members from seeing her facebook page before she posted her rant about her parents but did not block the family dog's facebook page --- so when Dad signed into Dog's facebook account, intending to upload a picture of that dog, Dad saw what his daughter had posted, and the rest is YouTube history.

Facebook lets you
a)leave your page open for all the world to see, or
b)permit only your accepted facebook 'friends' to see your page, or
c)give full access to some of your friends, while blocking views by specific friends.

Daughter chose option 'c'.
posted by easily confused at 7:30 AM on February 12, 2012


4. If by school, you mean grade school or high school, most schools will block Facebook from school computers. Of course, kids can figure out how to bypass that.
posted by SuperSquirrel at 8:38 AM on February 12, 2012


easily confused is correct, the father posted that explanation to his Timeline the other day...
posted by Exchequer at 8:47 AM on February 12, 2012


Note - the father came out with two explanations: the family dog one above and some other story about trying to upload some software to her laptop and coming across it.

My guess is that he has the login for her laptop with admin rights, fired up her web browser and she hadn't logged out. The dog story might be true but it also is more conveniently palatable than basically stalking his daughter's facebook page.
posted by MuffinMan at 12:02 PM on February 12, 2012 [1 favorite]


This Mefi post has additional details.
posted by invisible ink at 12:29 PM on February 12, 2012


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