Pattern of Life from Socials
Pattern-of-life analysis turns scattered public posts into a model of where someone is, when, and with whom. It is the most abusable technique in this repo: the same method produces a due-diligence report and a stalking dossier. The difference is authorization and scope, not tradecraft. The beginner error is collecting posts instead of analysing them — screenshots of a feed are not intelligence. Work four layers: account metadata, network, content, temporal behaviour. The first and last are the two everyone skips, and the two the subject can't curate.
Step 1 — Authorized scope
Read ../../ETHICS.md, then write down before opening a single profile:
- Subject — the account(s) and the real-world entity you believe is behind them.
- Objective — the question that ends the investigation. "Pattern of life" is not one. "Does this vendor's EU lead actually live in the EU" is.
- In / out of bounds — explicitly. Minors, uninvolved family, home address, health, religion, sexuality and immigration status are out unless the objective requires them and you can defend that.
- Posture — observation only, or authorized interaction. Following, liking, messaging and viewing stories are all interaction.
- Jurisdiction — yours, the subject's, the platform's.
- Stop condition — you stop when the objective is answered, when the trail lands on an uninvolved third party, or when the only question left is "where do they sleep."
Done when all six are recorded in the case file.
Step 2 — Choose a viewing identity, then preserve
Logged-out leaks less and sees less; logged-in sees more and leaks more.
Platforms variously report story views and profile visits to the subject, and
recommendation systems surface accounts that look at each other — so merely
viewing can put your research account in the subject's suggestions. Decide the
tradeoff using investigate-without-getting-made; never browse a subject from
a personal or employer account.
Then capture before you analyse. Accounts get locked or scrubbed
mid-investigation, often because someone noticed. Archive the profile and every
post you may cite via read-deleted-pages, and pull older snapshots — they
routinely show a previous bio, link, or handle. Save media locally.
Done when the viewing identity is recorded and everything you intend to cite exists as an archive URL or a local file with a capture timestamp.
Step 3 — Layer one: account metadata
Go after what the subject never chose. Full per-platform behaviour is in the platform disclosure matrix [blocked].
- Creation date. Shown outright on some platforms, derivable on others. Snowflake-style 64-bit IDs encode a millisecond timestamp in their high bits, offset from a platform-specific epoch — the ID is the signup time. Plain sequential IDs give registration order, so you can bracket a date against accounts of known age.
- The numeric ID. It survives handle changes, so it — not the handle — is the durable selector. Record it.
- Handle history. Seldom a feature, usually recoverable from old mentions, inbound links, archived snapshots and abandoned cross-posts. A freed handle can be reclaimed by a stranger, so an old link proves nothing about current control.
- Verification and linked accounts. Whether a badge is paid or identity-checked changes what it's worth. Linked sites and business-account contact fields expose emails and phone numbers the personal profile wouldn't.
Done when ID, creation date, handle history and every linked selector are recorded with sources.
Step 4 — Layer two: network
A subject's OPSEC is nearly irrelevant if their relatives tag them.
- Early followers. The first accounts to follow a personal account are overwhelmingly family, school friends and coworkers — it spread by word of mouth before it had reach. Where follower ordering is observable, the oldest tail is the highest-value segment on the page.
- Mutual-follow clusters. Reciprocal edges map real-world communities: employer, school cohort, hometown, club. The cluster is the finding; a single edge isn't.
- Tag direction. Who the subject tags is curated. Who tags the subject is not. Inbound tags from an open-book cousin routinely deliver the birthday, the house, the car and the workplace the locked-down subject withheld.
- Reply latency. Accounts that reliably comment within minutes are the inner circle, regardless of follower counts.
Build this in graph-the-network, not as a list.
Done when the inner circle, one real-world cluster, and the third parties who leak about the subject are identified and graded.
Step 5 — Layer three: content
Read past the subject of each photo to the accidental content: reflections in windows, mirrors, glasses and dark screens; laptop and phone displays in frame; paperwork such as boarding passes, parcel labels and event badges; vehicles, plates, dealer frames and parking permits. Repeated backgrounds are what upgrade a room from "somewhere" to "home" or "workplace" — count occurrences and note the date span.
Run secrets-in-file-metadata on everything you downloaded: platforms differ
in whether they strip EXIF, and the same platform may strip it from an inline
image while preserving it in a file attachment or an original-quality download.
Do the geolocation itself in geolocate-from-pixels. Sanity-check anything
that looks too convenient with is-this-photo-real.
Done when each location-bearing artefact is logged with post URL, date, and a pointer to the geolocation work.
Step 6 — Layer four: temporal behaviour
Extract every post timestamp into a table and plot hour-of-day and day-of-week. The extraction schema is in the analytic checklist [blocked].
A contiguous gap of roughly seven to nine hours is the sleep window, and its position gives a UTC offset — enough to separate continents, not neighbours. A weekday dip through business hours suggests employment with restricted device access; the inverse suggests shift work or a job spent online. Sudden multi-day offset shifts are travel.
What wrecks this: scheduling tools post at fixed wall-clock times regardless of where the human is, so a scheduled account measures the scheduler; platforms may render timestamps in the viewer's locale; edits can carry the edit time; and cross-posting bridges or shared team accounts blend several humans into one histogram. Establish that posting is manual before reading anything into shape.
Done when both distributions exist over a stated sample window, with an explicit inferred UTC offset and its confidence.
Step 7 — Consolidate and report
Link accounts on evidence: the same avatar file, the same link-in-bio target,
follower-set overlap, aligned histograms. Writing style alone is a lead, not a
link. Then run write-the-intel-brief. Every claim cites a post or archive URL
and a date; every temporal conclusion states sample window and sample size.
Done when no claim lacks a citation and no inference lacks a grade.
Where this goes wrong
- Sample bias. You're reading a self-published subset of a life. Silence means "didn't post," never "wasn't there."
- Backdating. A post date is an upper bound on the event date. Photos get posted months late, reposted, or lifted from someone else entirely.
- The account is not the person. Handles are sold, inherited, hacked and recycled; a long history may have changed hands. Partners, assistants and agencies post as the subject — two behavioural signatures in one histogram usually means two humans.
- Curated self-report. Location, job title and relationship status are marketing copy, and a common name plus a matching city is a coincidence generator, not a match.
- Rendering differences. Timestamps, follower ordering and mutual indicators change with login state, and are often approximate ("2h", "last week") rather than exact.
- Observation changes the subject. One who locks down mid-case may have been tipped off by you.
Grading a finding
- Confirmed — an authoritative record or the subject states it, or two independent artefacts of different types agree (an inbound tag from a separate account plus a geolocated background). Both archived.
- Probable — several consistent signals of the same type, or one strong signal with nothing contradicting it: a repeated background plus a temporal pattern consistent with living there.
- Unconfirmed — single-source, self-reported, style-based, or drawn from too small a sample. A timezone from a few dozen posts or fewer is unconfirmed, full stop.
Downgrade anything resting on an assumption you can't state in one sentence.
Worked example
Objective: confirm a supplier's "EU operations lead" is in Europe, as the contract requires.
Bio says Lisbon. The numeric ID decodes to a signup years before the company existed — so the bio says nothing about the present. Four months of timestamps cluster 14:00–05:00 UTC with a dead zone 06:00–13:00: a sleep window centred near 09:00 UTC, wrong for Lisbon, consistent with the Americas. Dead end: no geotags anywhere, and the platform stripped EXIF from every download.
The network layer breaks it. Early followers cluster around one US state university, and a relative tags the subject at a named local restaurant on a date the subject publicly claimed to be in Portugal; a repeated kitchen background appears on both sides of that date. Graded probable — no authoritative record places the subject anywhere, and a histogram can't separate adjacent countries. Reported with the sample window stated.
Pivots
Legal and ToS
Automated collection of profile and follower data breaches the terms of service of essentially every major platform and has been litigated as a computer-misuse matter in some jurisdictions; manual viewing of public content generally has not. Creating an account to view a subject is at minimum a ToS problem, and a fraud problem if you misrepresent identity to gain access.
Under GDPR and comparable regimes "publicly available" is not itself a lawful basis, and profiling a person's location and routine is high-risk processing. Political opinion, health, religion, sexuality and union membership are special categories — if they surface incidentally and aren't in scope, don't record them. And the one that matters: sustained monitoring of an individual's location and routine meets the statutory definition of stalking in many jurisdictions, and sourcing it publicly is not a defence. Authorization, a written objective and a stop condition are what make this work lawful.