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.

LinkedIn once again allows you to view search results for users without being logged into an account of your own.

Search by entering a First name and a Last name into the search boxes at the bottom of the homepage.

Results will include a portion of the publicly available information from up to five matching (or similar) profiles.

Click the user's name to view more of their publicly available information. Clicking the View Full Profile button will prompt you to log into your own account (and not display any information for the profile you chose).

The post LinkedIn Makes Changes to Search Capabilities appeared first on Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) in California, MCLE Los Angeles, CLE Orange County, Irvine & San Francisco.

Twitter appears to have disabled its pinpoint geographical search capability, and severely limited its other geographic search capablities. Some less precise geographic search capabilities do still remain.

Until recently, it was possible to enter the search instruction geocode (along with GPS coordinates for a specific location) into the search box at Twitter to retrieve tweets from that location or within a specified radius around that location. For example, geocode:35.0697244,-106.631294,2mi would retrieve tweets within a 2 mile radius of those GPS coordinates (Isotopes Park in Albuqueruque, NM). This search no longer reliably retrieves those results.

Until recently, it was also possible to enter a point of interest into the Near this place box on Twitter's Advanced Search page to retrieve tweets near (a limited list) of well-known geographic points of interest (e.g., Yankee Stadium, Golden Gate Bridge).
 

For most users, Twitter has converted the Near this place search to only auto-recognizing your current location (as detected using your Internet connection) after you click the Add Location button that now appears to the right of the Near this place label. (We say "most users" because the Near this place box does still appear in some Web browsers.) Clicking this button will retrieve tweets within a 15 mile radius of your detected location.

By default, there is no way to set any location other than the one automatically detected when you click this button. Luckily however, there is a way to override this default. To override the default, you can enter a location into Twitter's main search box this way:

near:"Culver City, CA" within:2mi

This search will retrieve results within a 2 mile radius of a central point within the city you define in your search. There does not appear to be a way to search more specifically than the city level.

We had no response to an email request to Twitter for comment on the status of its geographic searches.

The post Twitter 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.

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.

The Cybersleuth’s Guide to the Internet features extensive reviews of the best investigative and background research resources available for free (or at low cost) on the Internet.  Unlike others guides which present sites as little more than a list of links, this book offers tips on how to effectively use those sites and includes hundreds of screen-shots to illustrate step-by-step usage of many of the sites discussed.  

“The book is meant to be a guide for anyone who needs to conduct investigative and background research on the Internet but doesn’t necessarily have a big budget to do it,” said Levitt. "It’s designed to be a reference book; it is not meant to be read cover to cover,” she continued.  “As a law librarian, I have tried to organize this book the way researchers think by keeping like topics together. There are a number of concepts and search strategies that are applicable to numerous types of research we discuss in different chapters. Therefore, some strategies appear in more than one place in the book to keep the back and forth “page flipping” to a minimum.”

Because the vast majority of sites discussed in this book are freely available on the Internet, many of these resources could be located through Web searches if a researcher had the time to conduct those searches, sift through all of the results, and test out the sites until they had culled down the millions of potential sites to a list of the most credible, relevant, and useful. That’s where the authors of this book come into play: they’ve done the test searching and sifting for the reader so now they can learn about the most credible, relevant, and useful sites and how to quickly master them.

“The book offers something for researchers at all levels,” added co-author Rosch. “It starts off at the beginning laying out Web browser functions that some Web users might be less familiar with,” he began. “It then lays the groundwork of how search engines locate and retrieve the information we are searching for before it moves on to discuss more sophisticated search techniques and then how to apply those techniques to other Web sites to locate the information we're looking for.”

This new edition also includes a much longer chapter on how to locate hard to find Social Media profiles and how to use the information posted in Social Networking profiles as a powerful investigative research tool, a source of background information, and evidence.

Additionally, it includes more detailed recommendations for locating and using free public records, investigative research sites, and people finder resources available for free on the Internet, as well as lawyer/law enforcement-restricted low-cost pay services, such as TLOxp.com.

The cover price is $64.95. Quantity discounts are available on purchases of 10 or more copies from the publisher’s web site (http://www.netforlawyers.com/products).

The authors, Levitt and Rosch, have been internationally recognized CLE seminar speakers--full-time since 1999. They have been best-selling ABA Law Practice Division (ABA LPD) authors since 2003. Their areas of expertise are: Internet investigative, legal, and social media research; social media ethics; Google search; and Google cloud Apps. Together, Mark and Carole have authored hundreds of Internet research articles and co-authored all fourteen editions of The Cybersleuth's Guide to the Internet, and six ABA LPD books.

In 2013, they were both recipients of the "Fastcase Fifty" award, recognizing "50 of the smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders in the law" and in 2014, they both became Fellows in the College of Law Practice Management, the international honor society that recognizes distinguished law practice management professionals.

Previously, Carole was a California attorney, a law librarian in Chicago and Los Angeles, and a Legal Research and Writing Professor at Pepperdine School of Law. She graduated with distinction from The John Marshall Law School (Chicago) and served on the school s law review. Since 2003, Carole has served on the ABA LPD’s Publications Advisory Board and served on its Executive Council from 2006-11. Carole is currently co-authoring the second edition of Internet Legal Research on a Budget for the ABA LPD.

Mark, in addition to presenting seminars and writing books and articles, and also blogs and tweets about legal technology issues. He developed Internet For Lawyers’ website, blog, Facebook Business page, and IFL’s online CLESeminars.com webinar division. Mark is a graduate of Tulane University. He is active in the ABA LPD and serves on its Legal Technology Resource Center Board. Mark recently completed a three-year term on the ABA TECHSHOW Planning Board and prior to that he served on LPD’s Education Committee and its State and Local Bar Outreach Committee.

The post Internet Research Reference Book Cybersleuth’s Guide to the Internet Now in its 14th Edition 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.