Shameless Spying

This narrative is not about any well-known person or celebrity. The hero in this tale is just a Blogger or a reader like me or you, who prefers to be an anonymous Blogger, though he maintains a good readable blog with witty and humorous posts, each of which draws not less than fifty comments the first day itself. In Facebook, he had opened a special account to accommodate all the friend requests from his blog readers, and I also was his dedicated friend there following his posts with servitude. According to his Facebook profile information, his real profile has been active with no connection with the blogger’s profile, since he prefers to be an anonymous blogger.

In this narrative, I call him a hero, but if so, the villain of the story is myself. On the contrary, if he is the villain, I am the hero.  But in this case, the best suitable term to describe him will be ‘the prey’, and I’m the hunter. OK, for the sake of this narrative, let the name of the blog be ‘Candid Truth’.

While following the posts of Candid Truth, from the comment of someone among his innumerous fans, who might know the Blogger personally, I found his real name. Let’s call him Saurav. I also noted someone calling him with the letter ‘S’ in her comment, as if she has been insisted by him to not publicize his real name. Anyway, one day in Facebook, I commented to his status message, mentioning his name. Within minutes, he messaged me requesting me to not mention his name, because he prefers to be anonymous. I asked him about his real profile. He replied,

“This is just as real as the other”, and when I visited back his profile, the message which I posted mentioning his name was gone.

So, I decided to hunt his real self. And you know, there are thousands of Saurav’s in Facebook itself. Anyway within half an hour I sorted out the author of the Candid Truth from the thousands of results given by the single search in Facebook using the word Saurav, and friend requested. Within hours, he replied from the profile of Candid Truth, 

“How on earth did you get to my profile?”.

That was actually simple. I made it with the help of his friends. What I did was going to the first-ever post written by him. There I saw his first post itself had collected close to fifty comments. I was almost sure that among those who commented to his first post, a majority would be the ones who knew the blogger personally. 

I searched among the persons who commented him to his first post. Some names with their surnames usually make very unique combination. After collecting a few of such unique names, I searched Facebook with those coinages. It was easy to find out Candid Truth’s exact friends from the results because of those unique names. In some searches, only one person came up, and that was the one whom I was searching for. 

Now you know how did I find the profile of the blogger. I searched their friend lists shamelessly for the name Saurav. All those profiles had a common friend Saurav with his surname. I added him to my network. 

When he asked me how did I got to his profile, I messaged him,

“You know, every criminal leaves a trace. So it wasn’t that much difficult to trace you”