How to follow your shithead kids on facebook.

A quick note before you read on... The following shows that the internet is a terrible place, and that privacy is a very important thing. If your kids have their profiles set to private to stop you from snooping then you should be happy that they are using privacy settings, whilst you can't see what they are doing, at least know, that no one else that's creepy can as well. In the below I show ways of finding photo's using a very simple image search engine and i expose how easy it is to view someone's photo albums. I have tried to contact these people to let them know their photo's are public but i have not heard back. Please remember internet privacy settings are there for a reason and if you don't want some creepy blogger snooping through your photo's looking for pictures of your kids then set your albums to private.

A question that commonly gets asked at work is "How do i sneakily follow my kids on Facebook".

The general story goes that after years of raising, loving and caring, a 14 year old suddenly feels his parents aren't cool anymore (generally true) and so they set their profile to private and kick their parents off Facebook or refuse to add them.

The parents get crazy worried that their children are trying to hide something and come asking me for help to stalk them.

Well, luckily its a pretty easy 5 day process.

Firstly you are going to need to create a fake person. This starts firstly with a name, if you have daughters use a boys name, if you have boys.. use a girls name.. here's some examples. 

Boys - "Sarah Kindle"

Girls - "Dylan Jones"

Don't get to creative, the more elaborate the more fake it sounds. Once you have the name then you can create the email address. I suggest using Gmail, Cause frankly Hotmail is outdated and all the kids use Gmail these days. Picking the email address is very important, if you are making a female use something along the lines of "h0t_pr1ncess_grl@gmail.com" if you are making a male, use the name and fake d.o.b eg "dylan.jones1995@gmail.com".

Girls have crazy email address's because the think they will meet a rich guy and get married and have babies and never have to work.

Boys know they will need to eventually apply for jobs with this email address so they go with something a little more conforming. (if you think your little princess has the hots for Emo kids, use an email like "slash_my_wrists@gmail.com")

Remember, when making these fake emails to use your fake persons details (decided on a D.O.B, decide on an address, ect)

After you have created the mail accounts you are ready to put a face to the fake person you have created.

Using the very powerful and wonderful website Picasa do a quick search for something young people do... in this case i searched for "at the beach with friends" i then skipped a head 5 pages and found a random picture of a family, i clicked on the username of the person who uploaded the photo and found this web album. Now that i have an album i can save a few shots of the one attractive (male or female) person in the album. These photo's will be used for the profile so make sure there is some consistency in them.

I did the same process except used "PCYC" as my search term for a male photo... here are our 2 people.

What a HUNK!

Dolls are cool!

Now we have our pictures we can create our fake Facebook pages. Go through the signup process and create you fake people and use the same fake details you used for creating the fake email address.

Now the tricky part, adding random friends. Do a search in Facebook on a completely random name, make sure they are not associated to you in anyway, in fact make sure they are from another English speaking country. Here is an example of someone i found in 2 seconds. 

Now add all their age appropriate friends and a few other randoms. Feel free to search more profiles and add more randoms, send out at least 100invites. Out of that 100 maybe 50 will accept the random friend request, take note some people make take a while to reply so be patient.

Now while your friends list is populating its time to start being creative. Spend the next several day making status updates about random shit. As an example "So over exams, they sux" or "Got some new wax for my surf board, its fully sick". Also sign into YouTube with your fake email address and like some videos of hip current bands and share them on Facebook.

After 5 days you should have what looks like a real established Facebook page.

Now add one of your son or daughters friends, anyone. The less you know about them the better. In the friends request just say "You seem cool." Then leave it alone and never talk to them.

The next day add your son or daughter with the request "Hey (insert friend you added the day before name) said you are interesting!"

Then leave it at that.

You don't ever have to talk to them (in fact i highly suggest you don't) and you don't have to add anything else to the Facebook. Just leave it alone.

But now you can snoop!

Attention!

Don't actually do this (seriously it's a stupid idea and i don't honestly recommend it to anyone, learn to trust your kids), Instead block Facebook by adding it to your host file or by running opendns.org and adding Facebook to the blocked sites list.