The article tells about the collection of information about a person, why he is needed, for what purpose he serves, what is the assessment of this action from the point of view of the law and an example of such an action on the Internet.
Definition
Information gathering is a systematic accumulation of data with their subsequent sorting, double-checking, sifting out unnecessary and application for one or another purpose. Such actions can be carried out for various reasons and by various methods, whether it is searching for an attacker, a debtor by credit organizations, or a well-known person who has long died for drawing up her biography. They also differ in ways that are legal and not, we will talk about all of them in detail.
Police
The first thing that comes to mind with the phrase “collecting information about a person” is, of course, law enforcement and law enforcement agencies that need to find the criminal based on the facts and characteristics of his life. But sometimes such actions can also be preventive in nature, when the person is only a suspect, and facts and evidence are needed to draw up a charge. Also, information can be collected not in relation to a specific person, but his environment and type of activity as a whole. This does not always give positive results, but there are situations when such methods succeeded in preventing serious crimes or terrorist attacks.
Criminals
Information about a person can also be collected by criminals in relation to a future victim. Most often, various scammers are engaged in this, in order to take advantage of the accumulated information at their right time for their own benefit. Thus, telephone fraudsters acted , who, appearing to be relatives of a person, asked for any monetary services, for example, reported that they were in an unpleasant situation with the law and now only a large amount can help them out, which must be given to the investigator or the employees who detained him .
Despite the dubious nature of such a scheme, such a collection of information about a person paid off, since the fraudster, using the accumulated information, very plausibly pretended to be another person.
Such methods also work in industrial espionage, for the recruitment of an employee who occupies an important position, they use various unpleasant facts of his life and simply blackmail him.
Private investigators
Another area of activity in which it is necessary to be able to collect and obtain information is private detective agencies. Unlike the same law enforcement agencies, they are limited in funds and can only act in a specific order. So the question of whether it is possible to attract due to the illegal collection of information about a person, lawyers answer - it is possible. But for this it is necessary to provide evidence and facts that they really have at their disposal data that can only be obtained criminally. Well, or if you find listening or other tracking devices at home. But, as they say, not caught - not a thief. But often they act within the framework of the law, since then there is no desire to answer in court with detectives or their superiors and they all value their reputation.
But still, if you became a victim of espionage or you yourself decided to engage in such activities, then what does this threaten? The fact is that under the new legislation, the illegal collection of information for individuals is punishable only by a fine, and for legal entities its amount is much larger, but there is no criminal liability. However, only if the facts obtained, you did not make public, otherwise you will have to answer criminally.
Gathering information about a person on the Internet
Nowadays it is difficult to find a person who would not use the Internet. And most often it is used not only for work or study. The number of users of social networks is growing every year, and they all leave their traces there, in the form of photos with geo-tags or plain text about what they did or are going to do. So for a person who has set himself the goal of finding out something else on the Internet, this will not be difficult. Provided that the target intentionally does not hide data about itself or does not distort them.
The methods for collecting information about a person are very wide, ranging from illegal viruses such as malicious viruses to spying, intercepting traffic or rubbing oneself into trust by posing as an attractive representative of the opposite sex. But often this is not necessary, and using the methods of conventional social engineering, you can find out a lot. And even if this is done with malicious intent, it is difficult to prove the latter, since the person himself posted the facts about himself in the public domain.
The same applies to real life. There are absolutely legal services with which you can find out a lot of useful things. Starting from telephone directories on the Internet and ending with the bailiff service. True, for this you need to have passport data of a person and TIN.