A YouTuber has showed just how easy it can be for private investigators to find out loads about you.
British prankster Max Fosh turned the tables on himself back in late 2021 when he hired a private investigator to follow him for a whole month, and the results have continued to shock people ever since.
Fosh demonstrated how even finding a private investigator can be quite a challenge, since secrecy is very much their trade. He asked a friend to be the middle man to hire the investigator, to make sure he didn't know what to look for.
A paranoid month later, he met up with the investigator to find out what he was able to find out, and how closely he was surveilled.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the revelations shocked Fosh, even just when considering the many clips of footage showing Fosh going about his daily life, from shopping to playing five-a-side football with friends.
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Given that the investigator says he normally works for people looking for cheating spouses or disloyal business partners, simple surveillance like this is actually pretty easy.
There are days' worth of footage, making it clear that Fosh's every move had been monitored, but when they reviewed the investigator's other discoveries, the real shocks arrived.
The investigator's face was completely new to Fosh, which freaked him out a bit. From there it got worse, though, as the investigator reeled off his full name, address, parents' names and more.
Most shocking of all, the investigator knew Fosh's home Wi-Fi password, something that would let him get access to Fosh's network really easily - and he even knew the password to his Instagram account.
The password revelations clearly rocked Fosh, but they've also set people in the comments section below the video reacting to how easily the investigator found out such key details.
One person wrote: "I think everyone needs to have this done to themselves. People are just too lax when it comes to ones own personal privacy."
Another commented: "This was incredibly creepy to watch yet very entertaining."
The good news is that the investigator gave one piece of sage advice where the question of passwords was concerned - "use a password manager". That might not be rocket science, but it's probably worth considering if you haven't got one already - services like these can help you to encrypt your passwords and use different ones for every website or app you log into. Best of all, it's not all on your shoulders to remember each individual complex password.
So, if you take one lesson from Fosh's experiment, let it be that - your online information might be just as vulnerable as your in-person movements.