CLEwebinars.com is hosting "The Ethics of Social Media Research" webinar on June 28th at 1:00-2:30 pm ET, presented by Carole Levitt, Esq. & Mark Rosch. (This webinar qualifies for 1.5 hours of Ethics credits.)

In this webinar, you will learn how to avoid potential ethical traps when you research social media profiles to uncover investigative/background information about parties, witnesses, experts, jurors, etc., and, in some cases, to use this information as evidence. This program reviews pertinent Ethics opinions issued by the ABA and bar associations in many jurisdictions; discusses relevant caselaw; reviews detailed Guidelines for social media research issued by the New York State Bar’s Commercial and Federal Litigation Section; and ties them into the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct.

The program will also explore:

• Who's your friend?
• Could "friending" violate the deception or ex parte communication ethical rules?    
• Whether it is ethical to research the social media profiles of parties and witnesses during discovery or trial?
• Is it ethical to research the social media profiles of potential jurors before trial or seated jurors during trial?
• Could advising clients to delete, deactivate, or adjust privacy settings on their social networking accounts lead to an ethical violation or spoliation charge against you?
• How to configure security/privacy settings in your own profile to avoid ethical breaches.

The seminar is partially based on the speakers' fifty-five page Social Media chapter from their book, "The Cybersleuth's Guide to the Internet."

The post CLE Webinar Covers Ethics of Social Media Research appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Information contained in social media profiles like Facebook and LinkedIn can be valuable sources of background, investigative, and evidentiary information for attorneys.

Details of these changes can be found in the Addendum page for The Cybersleuth's Guide to the Internet.

The post Facebook and LinkedIn Change Process for Downloading Account Profile Information appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

In our in-person CLE seminars and online webinars, we have long taught legal professionals how they could conduct these email and phone number searches themselves to locate background and investigative research information on subjects using the search box at the top of Facebook pages (when you are logged into your own account). These searches were particularly useful in locating Facebook profiles where users had adopted a pseudonym for their profile (or had a common name leading to too many results) but had used a known email address or phone number to open the Facebook account. As of now, those searches no longer retrieve results.

Now, using the search box to search for the email address that an individual has associated with their Facebook account no longer retrieves any “People” results (see illustration below). Facebook will not even retrieve profile results for individuals you are “Friends” with on Facebook.

Instead of searching through the member database for the email address you’ve entered, Facebook now treats these searches as full-text searches. The site (attempts to) locate the email address you’ve searched for as text in publicly available posts. In the example in the illustration (below), the email address search results seen are displayed only because Carole included her email address as part of the text of the posts that were returned.

The same is true for phone number searches.

In an announcement on its site, Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer explained, how "malicious actors" had "abused these features to scrape public information" from Facebook profiles.

"Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we've seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way. So we have now disabled this feature. We're also making changes to account recovery to reduce the risk of scraping as well," he added in the post.

The post went on to detail how the company has limited access to various types of information, including:

• Search and Account Recovery
• Facebook Login
• Events API (Application Program Interface)
• Groups API
• Pages API
• Instagram Platform API
• Call and Text History
• Data Providers and Partner Categories
• App Controls

These changes are designed to limit the amount and type of information third-parties can share into and retrieve from Facebook pages.

Despite discontinuing these searches and methods of accessing profile information, the non-Facebook-affiliated search tool at SearchIsBack.com does still retrieve worthwhile relational search results (utilizing Facebook’s now also-discontinued Graph Search API). It’s unclear how long it will continue to function, however.

The post Facebook Kills Search Features Useful for Background and Investigative Research appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

This free eDiscovery industry white paper walks you through the steps to retrieve this information from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

Download it now for free.

The post Finding the Right Person on Social Media: An eDiscovery White Paper appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Facebook’s Graph Search allows you to create very sophisticated, relational searches through the information people share about themselves on Facebook.

"Graph Search" features appear to have returned to the Facebook search box - with some changes.

In the latest edition of The Cybersleuth's Guide to the Internet, we discuss recent changes Facebook’s Graph Search. Many of our most useful investigative-type Graph Search searches stopped returning results in late 2016.

For example, it had been possible to enter the following search in Facebook's search box:

People named Kirby who work at John Deere

It would retrieve a list of Facebook users with either the first or last name of Kirby who indicated in their profiles that they worked at John Deere.

While it is still possible to retrieve Graph Search results from the Facebook search box, Facebook has changed some of the search syntax used to form those searches. Now, to retrieve similar results to the sample search (above), we must enter the following search in Facebook's search box:

People who work at John Deere named Kirby

This subtle difference in word order is the difference between useful results and no results at all.

You can also create your own Graph Searches by forming them in the address bar of your browser using Facebook’s Graph Search’s search syntax and search parameters. We have created a list of those search parameters and some tips on search syntax to create those searches in this post on conducting Facebook Graph Searches.

The post Good News About Facebook Graph Search appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Facebook’s Graph Search allows you to create very sophisticated, relational searches through the information people share about themselves on Facebook.

"Graph Search" features appear to have returned to the Facebook search box - with some changes.

In the latest edition of The Cybersleuth's Guide to the Internet, we discuss recent changes Facebook’s Graph Search. Many of our most useful investigative-type Graph Search searches stopped returning results in late 2016.

For example, it had been possible to enter the following search in Facebook's search box:

People named Kirby who work at John Deere

It would retrieve a list of Facebook users with either the first or last name of Kirby who indicated in their profiles that they worked at John Deere.

While it is still possible to retrieve Graph Search results from the Facebook search box, Facebook has changed some of the search syntax used to form those searches. Now, to retrieve similar results to the sample search (above), we must enter the following search in Facebook's search box:

People who work at John Deere named Kirby

This subtle difference in word order is the difference between useful results and no results at all.

You can also create your own Graph Searches by forming them in the address bar of your browser using Facebook’s Graph Search’s search syntax and search parameters. We have created a list of those search parameters and some tips on search syntax to create those searches in this post on conducting Facebook Graph Searches.

The post Good News About Facebook Graph Search appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

For many years, searchers could use the search form at https://www.facebook.com/srch.php to perform a name search through the Facebook user database – even if the searcher wasn’t logged into their own Facebook account. The link to this search form was not prominently labeled and therefore under-utilized. 

Over time, the quality of the search results at this page deteriorated. Where the searches had once show relevant profile listings that matched the name you searched, more recently, search results were limited to ten results … and they were not even the 10 most relevant results. Searches for “Mark Rosch” would yield one or two of the six profiles using that name and the rest of the results list would be filled out with “similar” names (e.g., “Mark DeRosche”).

Regardless, none of that matters anymore, as the page no longer exists.

Name searches can still be conducted using the search box at the top of your profile when you're logged into your account. You can also use the same search box to conduct searches by email address or phone number.

The post Facebook Kills Off Name Search appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

If that Friend has a more relaxed privacy setting for their Friends list then the Mutual Friends you share will be displayed. CyberInt's Shay Priel describes it this way:

The vulnerability exists in the “Mutual Friend” section, in the following URL:
https://www.facebook.com/profile.name(Hidden Friends Profile)/friends?and=second.profile(Public Friends Profile)

Here is Facebook explanation about the Mutual Friends feature:

"Mutual friends are the people who are Facebook friends with both you and the person whose Timeline you're viewing. For instance, if you're friends with Chris, and Mark is friends with Chris, then Chris will be shown as a mutual friend when you're viewing Mark's Timeline".

So basically, if two users have mutual friends, these friends will be shown on Mutual Friends, even if one of them marked his\her Friend List as private (for no one else to see).

The ability to compare the Friends lists of two Facebook users and see the overlappping Mutual Friends could be a useful investigative research tool. You would need to know the Facebook usernames for each of the people about whom you are searching for information.

Priel has also created the Facebook Hidden Friends Crawler (for Linux) as "proof of concept." Non-linux users would have to manually construct the URL comparing the two users' Mutual Friends list using the URL schema above. 

Note, that if you're looking to lock down access to your own Friends list, this privacy setting IS NOT found behind the "lock and drop-down arrow" in the upper right-hand corner of your Facebook profile. To access this privacy setting you must visit your Friends page (https://www.facebook.com/UserName/friends_all) and click the pencil icon on the right-hand side, just above your Friends list.

The post How Private is your Facebook Friends List? “Feature” Could be Useful for Investigative Research appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

According to the Facebook report, police and other governmental agencies in the United States are, by far, the leaders in requests, asking for user data 11,000-12,000 times about 20,000-21,000  Facebook users. By comparison, the next heaviest requester was India, with 3,245 requests for data about 4,144 Facebook users. In contrast, Russia, Hong Kong (and some other countries) logged only one request each.

While other countries' numbers of requests are listed as definite numbers, the number of data requests from the United States is listed as a range. As explained by Facebook:

"We have reported the numbers for all criminal and national security requests to the maximum extent permitted by law. We continue to push the United States government to allow more transparency regarding these requests, including specific numbers and types of national security-related requests. We will publish updated information for the United States as soon as we obtain legal authorization to do so."

A Facebook account and log-in is required to access the report.

Other services such as Google and Twitter have previously released their own, similar Transparency Reports.

The post Facebook Releases First-Ever Government Request Transparency Report appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

The new Bing results display interface is broken up into three columns. The widest column, on the left-hand side displays a traditional looking list of relevant "blue link" results. The middle of the three columns, the "Snapshot," is supposed to feature "useful information related to [your] searches and compiled by Bing as a single 'snapshot' – all in one place in a separate column." However, all we have seen in this column our test searches are Ads.

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More Social

The far right-hand side of the search results page is where the most visible change to the results reside - in the collapsible "Sidebar." When you're logged in/connected to your Facebook account, the Sidebar includes "recommendations" from your Facebook friends based on your search terms and their "Likes." The Sidebar also includes signals from "experts and enthusiasts" leading to their blogs or Twitter feeds relevant to your search terms.

While conceptually similar to Google's Search Plus Your World, introduced earlier this year, Bing's implementation is different. While Google has chosen to tightly integrate the "social signals" into its main search results list, Bing has (mostly) chosen to segregate the social signals to the Sidebar. However, Bing does include social signals in the left-hand column of search results in the form of a "thumbs up" icon that indicates which of your Facebook friends has Liked a particular site on the results list. (It si unclear if these Likes are figured into where a particular site will rank on the results list. Additionally, where Google is relying heavily on its own Google+ social network for its social signals, Bing is compiling these signals from the more popular Facebook social network.

Less Search

As part of this redesign, Bing has moved the "Advanced Search" features that are available to narrow down your search results after you had conducted an initial search. Now, to access the Advanced search features you have to highlight your keywords in the search box (on the search results page) to bring up the link to the Advanced Search menu. This will also bring up a list of other suggested search terms.

Part of the rationale behind moving these features may be found in a quote from Bing Senior Director Stefan Weitz. "People are using the Web to do things in the real world, and that’s a big change from where things were a decade ago," he said in the press release announcing the changes. "And so the 10 blue links that search has been predicated on for the last decade no longer makes sense. Simply put, that’s not how you get things done." While this may be true for some searches, this is not necessarily true for the types of background and investigative research lawyers, paralegals, and other legal professionals need to conduct via search engines. 

The post Bing Revamps Results: More Social…Less Search appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.