Hidden Social Media Accounts

Use these techniques to search for hidden social profiles:

• Search by Email on social media networks such as Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter;
• Search by Username – many people repeat usernames from one platform to another;
• Google Search – use someone's full name between quotation marks as in "John Doe" followed by their city "New York" and add a command to find within the website URL. For instance: "John Doe" "New York" site:facebook.com;
• Google Search by Image - go to images.google.com and search the person's name or other nicknames they frequently use. If their Twitter or Facebook profile photo shows up, click on it, then select "View Page" and you'll land right on their respective social media page;
• Use other web search engines like Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, or Bing. For more in-depth searching, try the meta search engine DogPile, Monster Crawler, and WebCrawler (the oldest surviving search engine);
• Use Wayback Machine - World Wide Web's digital archive created by the nonprofit organization Internet Archive based in San Francisco where you can see web pages that no longer exist.

Even if you hide your Instagram account and email from public view, people could still find your Instagram profile page if they're searching by email. To fully protect your email privacy, do the following:

• Don't use your personal email address for Instagram (use a new or different one);
• Make your account private:
• From Computer: go to your Insta profile -> "Edit Profile" and choose the "Private" feature;
• From a Mobile Device: tap on the menu (the 3 horizontal lines on the top right corner of your profile) -> "Settings" -> "Privacy" -> "Private Account" -> toggle on "Private."
• Disconnect your contacts:
• From a Smartphone or Tablet: tap on the menu -> "Settings" -> "Contacts Syncing" -> toggle off the "Connect Contacts" option;
• From your Computer: go to your profile -> "Edit Profile" -> "Manage Contacts" -> delete synced contacts then toggle off the feature on a smartphone.
• Unlink Instagram form other social networks:
• On Twitter: "Linked apps" -> revoke access to Instagram;
• On Facebook: "Settings" -> list of linked platforms -> check off Instagram;
• On Tumblr: "Settings" -> "Applications" -> cancel access to Instagram.

Officially, you cannot have an anonymous Facebook page profile, but off the record, you can. 16% of Facebook users (accounts) are duplicates or fake. To make it difficult for other people to track down your "anonymous" account, try the following:

• Configure your profile to be invisible to the general public (except friends and friends of friends) from the "Facebook Privacy Settings and Tools" menu;
• You can hide your profile (make it completely invisible) from specific users by blocking them;
• Deactivate your account;
• Use the "Privacy Preferences" menu to hide the majority of your profile info.

Whatever you do, your name and profile picture will always be visible on your personal profile. The problem with creating a secret Facebook account is that you're breaking the Facebook rules and your account might be disabled. Facebooks community' policy requires full identity disclosure, specifically the real first and last name (no initials). Using Facebook with a fake name could result in account suspension.

With 69% of the U.S. population regularly using social media platforms, it's estimated that in 2019, the average person had 7 active social networking accounts (people aged 55-64 had 4.6 and those aged 16-34 had 8.7). According to a report from GlobalWebIndex:

• Daily, we spend around 2 hours and 15 minutes on social media;
• 98% of people have at least one social network account;
• 90% of people surveyed use at least 1 of Facebook's central 4 services;
• 50% of internet users use WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

Facebook is the best mainstream social network for people who want to connect with family and friends while still having a huge amount of control over their privacy settings because:

• It operates on the friend-request model (unlike Twitter followers, Facebookfriends need manual approval);
• Give users access to complex privacy and security settings;
• You can lock down access to past posts and hide your timeline from public view from Account Settings -> Privacy Settings -> "Who can see my stuff?" -> "Limit Past Posts."
• Use the "View As" feature to check how the general public sees your profile. If there's something you want to hide away, click on the "Edit" icon for that post and limit the audience of the post from "Public" to "Friends", "Specific Friends", or "Only me".

When it comes to reliable encrypted instant-messaging apps, since 2016, WhatsApp is the best in terms of end-to-end encryption which means secure communication and enhanced user data protection against malicious attacks. In other words, if cybercriminals want to breach and decrypt your WhatsApp conversations, they will not be able to do it.

If you're searching for people online, here are some go-to websites for a deep search:

• Infortracer.com extracts data from numerous sites, databases and even social networks like LinkedIn or Facebook to uncover personal information like phone number, full name, current and past street addresses, email addresses, family members, social links, work history, photos, alumni info, relatives, and more. To narrow down a name search, input the city of residence.
• Classmates is another US-only website for people who have an idea of the high school(s) the person they're looking for attended. You'd need their student name, state, city, and school to begin with.
• LinkedIn is an alternative way of finding someone's email address, current and past jobs, education, qualifications, and more.
• Usersearch.org is a reverse search tool that picks up individuals with just their username, email address, or phone number. It even focuses on covering cryptocurrency users with an active presence on forums.
• TinEye is a very useful alternative to Google Image Search and if you're trying to find someone by only usingtheir photo. TinEye's reverse image search tool uses advanced image recognition technology that identifies people based on the images you upload.

If you only have a photo of someone, the easiest way is to learn more about them is through Google and Facebook:

1. Go to Google Images, click on the little camera icon in the search bar (on the left). From the dropdown menu, select "Search by Image" then upload the photo or paste the photo's URL and Google will explore all the popular social media sites and beyond for a perfect photo match.
2. Onceyou find a photo online, right-click on it and check the file name. If it has "fb" in it, it's from Facebook and the file name is made of 3 blocks of numbers separated by periods or underbars (_). The middle one is the "Facebook profile ID"). In your web browser's address bar copy/paste "https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=" followed by the profile id number, without a space. Press "Search" and you should land on that person's Facebook profile.