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Comment by swalsh | Hacker News Reader

I have a friend who is a private investigator. He mostly films people committing insurance fraud. His stories are amazing. My favorite was a guy who was supposedly not able to walk, but my friend had stalked the guys facebook, and saw that he was planning on attending this festival with thousands of people. Probably lots of walking. The trick was finding the guy. So he went to the parking lot and quickly tracked down the guy's car (before he was a PI, he repossessed cars, he's a pro at finding cars). After that, he went to the info desk and told them the guys car's lights were on. They made a quick announcement, and he went back to the parking lot to watch. Dutifully his target came back, looked, shrugged his shoulders, and then went back. My friend spent the rest of the night filming the guy walking, jumping, having a good time.

He tells me the low tech ways are the most effective :\

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> "He tells me the low tech ways are the most effective :\ "

But they don't scale up with numbers or across geographically. The scary thing about automated processes of facial recognition is precisely the ability to scale to everyone and everywhere.

This and other automated tracking/recording/etc methods will basically make privacy a thing of the past. It should be illegal, because without privacy, there can't be democracy (see the Facebook scandals as an example).

Isn't privacy/anonymity in a crowd just a thing of the present? In a small village, everyone knew who you were and knew your past.

Even assuming everybody in that village knows everybody else to the degree that Facebook knows you, it is at least mutual; ol' Grandma Francine knows I'm foolin' around but I know what Grandma Francine got up to when she was my age and who her daughter's real dad is, too. What private things do you know about the people serving ads to you? Nothing. Yesterday I saw someone on HN discussing their download of info from Facebook, which is supposed to include what advertisers know what, and they found they couldn't even find the advertiser's company name in Google.

And ol' Grandma Francine doesn't scale. Her bad behaviors can't bend the very social fabric of society, nor is she corrupting the public square by abusing her knowledge of the townspeople to sell them things and "nudge" them and manipulate them; Grandma Francine is very talkative but not necessarily that bright, certainly not "we hired every PhD who we could get our hands on and turned them loose with an open expense line to buy hardware with" sorts of smart and manipulative.

Believe it or not, the world is evolving to become smaller and like a small town gradually. Sad... no more curiousity about my neighbor towns

Is it time to start advocating against social media?

So instead of privacy, I think we should push/work on transparency/openness on all side as much as possible. Facebook know everything about me, I want to know everything about facebook too.

You could move to a new village. For bonus points you call yourself a traveling preacher for instant credibility, or claim to be some famous person

Not really. Many peasants in Europe for example were bound to the land.

In addition, moving was even more devastating then than it can be now. Mutual aid and social networks were everything, outsiders not trusted.

> It should be illegal, because without privacy, there can't be democracy (see the Facebook scandals as an example).

Wouldn't surprise me if China essentially made privacy illegal some time in the future.

> without privacy, there can't be democracy

You would have to suspect that the Chinese government aren’t missing this aspect.

maybe not, but those technologies are spreading everywhere... including license plate readers at every corners... which is why Steve Jobs didn't have one on his car... But he could have been tracked some other ways... with the wireless sensors in his tires for example (and most cars communicate wirelessly with the manufacturer)

No license plates? How did he get away with this? Sounds interesting, got a source for further reading?

The first search result from "steve jobs no license plate". https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/07/steve-jobs-loophole-clo...

Anything you say is going to sound dumb with that username

I've been getting into OSINT since I started talking with the arms control community (over my concerns about mass cyber attack and autonomous vehicles) and you'd be floored at how shitty the tools they use are.

If you're even a halfway decent data scientist or cyber security professional you'd be 10x more effective at actually munging through data and finding people. Even simple things like munging through millions of records with regexes are hard for them.

It's not surprising to me that they think low tech ways are the most effective. The tools they use are really horrible and pale in comparison to basic shell scripting, let alone scipy.

There's a really interesting Defcon talk about the subject: https://youtu.be/uBy2N0NmS2o

Interesting story and his method is effective. However it is not efficient, he can only track one guy a day, possibly a week.

When he catches a guy he saves the company tens of thousands of dollars. He only needs to catch one guy a week for it to be economically feasible to use his time. By the time they give him the case, there had already been a number of red flags.

However automation will allow everyone claiming this sort of beenfit on insurance to be automatically followed, evidence automatically gathered, and perhaps a minimum wage flunky in India to give it a once over before the automated summons is sent.

The cheat will be caught far sooner, and the PI will be out of a job.

Of course those who aren't cheating will also be caught, as the cameras identify people who look very similar, and the courts listen to how the camera has a 1 in a million chance of being wrong (therefore will identify 350 people in the US as being the same person).

It's DNA evidence problems all over again.

His methods are efficient under the constraint of "not resorting to mass surveillance". I'd feel better if that constraint continued to exist.

I think that's the point they're trying to make.

It's already easy to track someone down but it requires manpower, which limits the scope of tracking and requires the tracker to have a real motivation.

What's scary about mass surveillance is tracking of anyone and everyone for any reason at any time with very little required effort.

I know someone who works at CarpeData, and the agents just search through Facebook/Twitter/etc all day. A lot of low hanging fruit!

> My favorite was a guy who was supposedly not able to walk

Isn't this something that the insurance company would be able to confirm by forcing the person to undergo a medical exam? Seems hard to imagine that such a disability can be faked well enough to fool a doctor.

For a $1000 your doctor will say whatever you want.

Normally the insurance company will want there own doctor and the consequences of losing your medical licence are massive to take the risk.

> He tells me the low tech ways are the most effective :\

> He tells me he’s most familiar with the low tech ways

FTFY. Interesting story though, always neat to see how people like that operate.

FTFY? I feel like this is the first time I’ve seen that one. Googled it, “fixed that for you”. Interesting.

interesting but annoying. they saved themselves some characters but cost you the time to google it.

It's common on Reddit.

> It's common on Reddit.

> It's common on the Internet.

FTFY :^)

This just feel like further evidence that i'm turning into my parents as i age. Also, the down-votes I got on that seem to tell me people are odd...

> FTFY. > Fixed that for you.

Fixed that for you.

Your friend sounds like a jerk

Why do you say that? He's a professional investigator, and the story is about catching someone committing fraud. How is that being a jerk?

PIs definitely go into a lot of grey areas, and believe not every job they take is so straightforwardly legal as catching insurance fraud...

Their bread and butter is affairs and investigation of the claims of a lawsuit.

You also said he used to be a repo man. Does he have a mustache, tophat and cane?

He harasses people get doesn't know are guilty.

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