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Think Private Facebook Profiles Pages Are A Dead End? Think Again!

Last updated on September 16, 2020

As the old saying goes… Facebook giveth, and Facebook taketh away (RIP graph search #neverforget).

Well, in late 2019, Facebook did a little bit (a lotta bit, actually) of both, with their facelift and feature overhaul, creating “new Facebook”. Different search options, new buttons, and an all-around different feel, sent many of us change-resistant folk into angry fits. After all, we’ve been betrayed before! Is this the Decline of Facebook Civilization part 2? (obscure 80s hair-metal movie reference)

If you’re using “new Facebook” perhaps not…

Let’s say you’ve finally arrived, after much strategic pivoting and searching, at your target’s personal profile page. Sweet success! You click excitedly and reach for the champagne as the page loads, but just as you’re about to get your Dom Perignon buzz on, you see it… their wall is blank. No photos, no posts, nothing but a single profile photo set atop a banner with empty boxes underneath. An investigative slap in the face for sure, especially when you’d been expecting to find troves of delightful SOCMINT goodness. How could this be? You had plans! You had dreams!

Now, before you pack up your investigative bags and head for Instagram, I have a little something you might want to see. “New” Facebook added a handy little feature that just might open some doors you weren’t expecting, doors that might remind you of the glorious graph search of old (seriously, #neverforget). That little search button on side of the profile page? It’s not just for what you can see. Here, let me show you…

Notice the profile page is of no use to us at all. Locked down… No photos, no friends, nothing. (profile photo and banner photo are redacted). Well… why don’t we click on that search button and type in the profile owner’s first name as it appears on the page:

BOOM! Suddenly, we’ve got something to look at besides an empty wall! Not only do we get several new photos of our target, but we’ve also acquired new pivot points, namely an account we’ll refer to as “A” who posted “family photos on a beautiful day”. But we’re not done yet…
Let’s try searching for the full first and last name as it appears on the profile:

Different photos! Not only that, but we have a potential fiancée’s name thanks to the photographer’s captions, and since the posts are several years old, let’s suppose they might have tied the knot and now we have the name of this person’s potential wife. Another pivot point!

A quick search for just the target profile’s last name by itself yields yet another unique photo and a business check in:

Now, before we get too far along with searches on our target profile, let’s pivot to the “A” account page on a new tab, and try searching there for our target’s first name:

You guessed it, more photos! Not only that, we see our target is being called Uncle, and his fiancée is being called Aunt. From there, we can surmise the marriage likely took place, and we now have a spouse, and another source of potential intel to work from.
Moving back to our target’s profile page, there are a number of other things worth searching that may yield even more new results. How about searching happy birthday?

Just like that, we have a potential birth date for our target profile owner, and the name of a brother, along with a (redacted) photo of both.

From this point we can go on and on, but I think you get the idea. Pivot to the other profile pages, search their walls for the target profile’s name, find more photos, find more names, search those names on the wall, and continue to expand this person’s network. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination. (and Facebook’s AI, but who understands that stuff anyway?) What about searching words like: mother, father, family, Christmas, Thanksgiving, work, love…?

Remember a few minutes ago when we were frustrated and ready to walk away from this account, and mark it as stone cold? Instead, we used this handy little trick and in just a few minutes, we’ve developed photos, a birthday, a spouse, a brother, some associates, and several other places to look for even more information. It went from a dead end to a small gold mine in just a matter of minutes because we knew where to look!

Next time you find yourself arriving at a target profile page, give this trick a try.  
Even those pages which are already more open will still yield information you didn’t expect, or would have had to dig, and dig, and dig to find. Let Facebook’s AI turn your searches to intelligence and click that button! We’ll call it graph search junior, for as long as it lasts.

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