When my partner (who is from the EU) got to the US this most recent time (she visits here for 90 days at a time, as allowed under VWP rules), immigration pulled her aside with a printout of (public-facing) facebook pages on their desk. Interesting only in that her face book is not under her official name. They had pages and pages of printouts that they thought proved she wasn't simple a tourist, and that she was working here, etc. Note, it was all public (or semi-public with a lot of crawling around under alternate emails, leading to other names, etc etc) so nothing "intercepted". But still a bit worrying when you get pulled aside and someone has a folder ready full of pictures of you, your business website (freelancer), your facebook posts, your tweets, etc
Interesting. Any theories on how they linked that FB profile to her real name? Maybe through the WHOIS record of her website, that got linked from that Facebook page often enough to imply a relationship?
Probably not even anything that difficult. If you search for her last name and city, her freelance site comes up. If you go through the freelance site you get an email. Under a search for that email, I think there is a livejournal. In livejournal info there is a link to the facebook page. Etc etc. Something like that. Just google search a few things and play "follow that link"
Worthwhile not because of super spy tactics, nothing any of us couldn't do in 10 minutes of looking for a person, but because its a reminder of how much info people leave out in the open even if they are semi privacy conscious, and also whether you think it is valid or not (I don't obv) immigration is going to get anything they can to figure out why you are here if you are a "frequent tourist" and seemingly from all of our interactions with them, the thing they are most concerned about, to the point of being fanatical, is whether or not you are making any money while you are in the US.
In the age of telecommuting, multinational clients, etc this makes no sense. (My partner can of course hire American clients when in Europe, but can't even work for European clients when in the US) but not exactly the first time bureaucracy is dragging behind the way we are actually living.
If someone has had their real name on their profile at any time, and later changed it, it's pretty easy to still find using the real name. Trivially so if they chose a username that contained their real name.
