Cyber stalking with Netflix’s ‘You’ – poetic license or accurate storytelling?

New Netflix series ‘You‘ follows the story of a bookshop manager who begins stalking a grad student who he meets after she walks into his shop. But does the series use poetic license when it details his online stalking efforts, or is it really that easy?

A warning; this article contains mild spoilers for the first 10 minutes of the first episode in the ten-part series. We say mild because the gist of what we cover here is shown in the trailers for the series.

In the first episode we see Joe, the bookshop manager, armed only with her name, begin a stalking campaign against grad student Beck. A campaign that starts online. In only moments of Internet surfing, Joe finds out all about her, including the names of her family members, where she goes on holiday, where she was raised, the names of her friends, where she graduated, where she works and yes, where she lives. An identity thief and a stalkers dream.

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This is covered in only the first ten minutes of episode one, and it’s essentially a retelling of the classic social media privacy horror story of the 21st century. But did Hollywood use some fanciful storytelling here as they often do concerning cyber security and privacy. Or is what Joe did a shockingly accurate reality?

Given that we’re discussing it here, you’ve probably already worked out that it’s more of the latter. That is, if you’re cavalier about what you post to social media and your privacy settings.

In the show…
In the show, Joe begins his stalking campaign by simply entering the name of his target into a search engine, and immediately finds the right social media account.

In real life…
This is pretty easy to do in real life, especially if the person you’re searching for has a unique name. But you’re not restricted to search engines. Social networks themselves have search facilities that also let you enter other filters such as location or job if you’re having trouble finding a specific person.

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In the show…
Joe finds that Becks photos are all set to public, allowing him to peruse everything she’s uploaded to her social media accounts, including photos of her with friends and family. Places where she grew up. The names of her siblings and her friends.

In real life…
All social networks have privacy settings, allowing you to decide who sees what you can post. But those social networks also allow you to have your account wide open. Many users still use the Public setting on sites like Facebook and Instagram, and the vast majority of Twitter users have their account set to public. From there, the photos you upload can be extremely telling, and they also allow strangers to see who you’ve been tagged with, which can give away the identity of your friends and family. Old photos can allow someone to see where you grew up, and tagged photos can also lead someone straight to the accounts of friends, even siblings.
 
In the show…
Joe discovers when Beck went to school through a combination of a photo with her wearing a jumper with her school name, and a subsequent post about university.

In real life…
Social media users cavalier about their privacy run this risk too. A mere photo with something identifying a school – such as an item of clothing, a tagged prom photo, a retro school photo posted by a friend – can all give a stranger the identity of where you went to school and consequently where you grew up.

In the show…
A photo posted by Beck reveals where she worked.

In real life…
Just as with having your school revealed, all sorts of posts or photos can reveal where you work. A photo from a works party, a photo of you outside your workplace, or even having your workplace freely available in your public biography will all give a stranger access to a vital piece of information about you.

In the show…
Joe works out Beck’s home address by dragging a photo of her outside her door into a search engine, which duly revealed her street address.

In real life…
This is perhaps the only part of the show that does use a splash of poetic license, because it’s not quite that easy. At least not yet. With that said, if you thought it was impossible, you’d be wrong too.

Tools that can tell you where a photo was taken are actually very popular. Typically these are tools that extract the EXIF information (hidden information embedded in a photo) that an often include the coordinates of the location of the photo. However these tools probably wouldn’t be relevant in this context, because most social networks, including Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, strip this data when you upload the photo, meaning these tools wouldn’t work for a social media stalker like Joe.

However tools like Google’s PlaNet that can decipher where a photo was taken just by looking at the pixels themselves are making great progress. Such tools use a variety of techniques, including looking for landmarks or unique features, weather conditions and – perhaps most tellingly – comparing photos to a huge database of known photos. Remember, Google owns the extraordinary large cache of street level photos is uses in its Google Street View feature. It’s not a public feature just yet, and it doesn’t work as the Netflix show implies. But in the upcoming years, it is certainly possible that you could just drag a photo into a search engine, and voila, the location.

In the meantime, though, photos of your house may very well present clues to any cyberstalker. House numbers and street signs could all be inadvertently captured, and with tools like Google Street View, it is easier than ever to track down a photo to a particular location.

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So if you want to know first-hand what social media over-sharing and lax privacy settings can lead to, re-watch the first ten minutes of ‘You‘. Because it’s not the same level of fiction as you first may have thought. Having your posts and photos public, or oversharing on a site like Twitter, can give anyone a wealth of information about you, quickly and easily.

Learn more about locking down your Facebook account here.