A father and son from the United Kingdom have reunited after 37 years thanks to a people search on Facebook.

The son, Andy Spiers-Corbett, was only two years old when his parents separated. That was his last contact with his father Graham Corbett.

Over the years the two men have spent countless hours trying to find each other. Even though they only live a half hour away from each other, their search for one another seemed to go nowhere.

Then one day Andy, now 39, did a people search on Facebook for his father’s name. Andy recognized his father’s picture from a list of men named Graham Corbett.

He then sent a message to Graham through Facebook and in a few days he received the response: ‘Hello son’.

Since a the Facebook contact a few weeks ago, the two men pair have met in person.

Through the reunion, Andy has learned that he has two half-brothers and a half-sister along with nieces and nephews.

Andy said, ‘there’s been a big part missing for so long but now everything is all right. It’s such a wonderful feeling. The internet is an amazing invention.’

[ source: Daily Mail ]

A new mobile app that uses facial recognition technology with your mobile camera phone to recognize and identify people is raising stalking fears.

The “Recognizr” app matches pictures of people taken with your camera phone with online pictures on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The mobile app can reportedly identify personal details of complete strangers using facial recognition technology and social network profiles.

Critics say the people search app could be used by thieves, stalkers and scammers intent on blackmailing others.

The Recognizr app is the creation of Swedish software company The Astonishing Tribe.

Some security professionals see the app as an invasion of personal privacy and a “a stalker’s dream.”

[ Source: The Sun ]

WhitePages people search ( www.whitepages.com ) announced last week that they will add social network profiles from Twitter and Facebook to their people search engine.

Users will now be able to search for a person’s phone number and address as well as profile pages on Facebook and Twitter for people.

Whitepages hopes the addition of social network profiles in their people search results will enhance the services reputation as the most comprehensive and useful people search engine online.

Whitepages CEO Alex Algard stated: “Whether it’s social data, landlines, cell phones, or email address, WhitePages is committed to building the most comprehensive people search service on the Web.”

Social networks and regular search engines often fall short as effective people search tools due to their large indexes of data.

Users can benefit from niche people search engines like WhitePages. Over the past decade the Whitepages people search engine has enhanced is search to include nicknames and name relevancy matching.

The announcement to include social network profiles in the Whitepages people search is a preview of how social network information will eventually be included throughout the WhitePages search engine.

By the mid 2010, WhitePages hopes to expand the number of social network listings by adding social network profiles to their work and residential search results.

People can also add links to their own social network profiles by using WhitePages’ personal editing options.

[ Source: Market Wire ]

On August 13, 2009 Evan Ratliff, a writer for Wired Magazine, who had written about the faked deaths and intentional disappearances of other people in past articles, began his own hi-tech game of hide and go seek when he left San Francisco that evening on a travel adventure that involved evading being found for a whole month.

On August 14, 2009, almost 24 hours after Ratliff embarked on his adventure to disappear, Wired Magazine posted the following online message to readers: “Author Evan Ratliff Is on the Lam. Locate Him and Win $5,000.”

The invitation to take part in the manhunt for Evan Ratliff by Wired Magazine coincided with the publication of Wired’s September 2009 issue, which contained a page of mugshot-style pictures of Ratliff for readers to view.

People who joined the search for Evan Ratliff would have from August 15 and September 15, 2009 to locate him.

The contest was straightforward: Ratliff will try to disappear for a month under a new identity while Wired readers and others try to find him.

Ratliff’s editor at Wired, Nicholas Thompson was given complete access to Ratliff’s personal information, including: his real bank accounts; credit cards; phone records; social network accounts, and email addresses.

In addition, Thompson was given contact information for Ratliff’s friends so he could interview them. Thompson would then periodically reveal some of Ratliff’s personal information online for searchers who took part in the manhunt.

The search for Ratliff ignited Twitter discussions under the #vanish hash tag as well as Facebook groups and discussions on finding him. At one point the search for Ratliff generated 600 Twitter posts in a day.

From a recent Wired article, written by Ratliff on the event:

What had started as an exercise in escape quickly became a cross between a massively multiplayer online game and a reality show. A staggeringly large community arose spontaneously, splintered into organized groups, and set to work turning over every rock in Ratliff’s life. It topped out at 600 Twitter posts a day. The hunters knew the names of his cat sitter and his mechanic, his favorite authors, his childhood nicknames. They found every article he’d ever written; they found recent videos of him. They discovered and published every address he’d ever had in the US, from Atlanta to Hawaii, together with the full name and age of every member of his family.

Ratliff planned for his disappearing act for months in advance and used a combination of both hi and lo-tech tools and tactics to evade being located, including:

- letting his hair and beard grow out.

- using several different laptop computers.

- installing software to hide his web searches and registering numerous fake email addresses.

- a set of professionally designed business cards with a fake company name and the fake personal name of James Donald Gatz.

- two prepaid cell phones purchased with cash and prepaid gift cards for purchases.

- Just for Men beard-and-mustache dye along with numerous other disguising tools like glasses and hats.

- a $477 bank cashiers check for rent on an anonymous Las Vegas office.

- a combination of “head-fake” tactics and misdirections were used to throw his hunters off his path.

Evan Ratliff’s vanishing adventure took him from San Francisco on a zig-zag-criss-cross trip around the US to New Orleans, where he was eventually tracked down and located on September 8, 2009 by a computer programmer named Jeff Reifman who worked long distance with New Orleans resident and Naked Pizza owner Jeff Leach to find Ratliff.

Ratliff’s visits to the Naked Pizza website helped to verify his location in New Orleans where he was ultimately found.

Ernest Hemingway wrote: “There is nothing like the hunting of a man… and those who have hunted men and liked it have never cared for (hunting) anything else thereafter.”

And so it goes for all the people who set out to hunt and find Evan Ratliff.

To read the full intriguing and highly instructive story about how Evan Ratliff disappeared and how he was tracked and found, read his story on Wired.com.

You can also watch Evan Ratliff discuss his personal story in the video below.

ABC will air a preview tonight for a new television series called Find My Family at 9:30 eastern / 8:30 central time.

The show centers around finding and reuniting family members that have lost contact with each other.

The show relies on a team of researchers and the hosts Tim Green and Lisa Joyner help people searching for lost family members.

Each episode covers the story and search for mothers, fathers, daughters and sons who have lost contact for years and are reunited again.

Viewers will learn the background stories of the people who are searching for their lost relatives.

After gathering the background information, the Find My Family research begins the difficult task of searching through public archives and records to find the missing family.

Host Lisa Joyner makes the initial contact with the found family members to inform them that someone from their biological family is searching for them, while host Tim Green meets with the people who are doing the search.

You can watch a clip from Find My Family and read more about the series on ABC’s site @ Find My Family.