INFORMATION GATHERING AND REPORTING OF A PERSON THROUGH SOCIAL NETWORKS

Abstract

Most of today’s Internet users are registered to one or more social media applications. As so many are registered to multiple applications, it has become difficult to locate friends, former colleagues, peers and acquaintances. Reasons for this include private profiles, name collisions, multiple usernames, lack of profile attributes and profile picture. In this project we are developing an online web platform that will gather information from different social media platforms and combine it into one single web application which will show a proper footprint of a person searched for. We have used technologies like Node.js/Express for Server side handling, Nightmare.js for web scraping and React.js for our view layer to build this online platform and to collect the data needed to bring all required information from social media websites which then will be displayed on our platforms. This paper discusses about the current platforms that are working similar to the one we are developing. The main aim of this project is to help people gather information about a person through all his social media presence over different platforms. This paper further discusses the methodologies used for data gathering and information retrieval of a person, i.e. how data of a single person shall be retrieved from different platforms and compiled together at one single website.Due to the nature of project, we rely on data from other social platform for which we clarify that no ethical boundaries were crossed by us and we have respected the rules & policies regarding the user data on different social platform like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Linkedln.