I was reading an article about spying on your competition by subscribing to their social media.

Does shadowrun have any rules about digging up profile information about someone? Anyone ever incorporate social media into their runs?

When you do a background check on Mr Johnson, do you see his college frosh pics? Turn up tweet data about supplanting someone at his organization?

How have you integrated the phenomenon of social media into data collection in your games?

I don't have rules, per se, as I just factor this into Data Search rolls. I end up planting hooks into contact's social media feeds, so I do supply a lot of information there, but its just legwork or basic Data Search rolls.

A Johnson that tweets about the Shadowruns (s)he sets up doesn't live very long...

P2.0 disagrees with you a bit about that. But only a bit! LA is a different beast than the rest of it.

My games haven't had a lot of background checking on the Johnsons. They've also been mostly on the level.

Yeah, but that's LA. LA-LA land has always been a bit strange.

So far, my group hasn't looked into the histories of Johnson's either, which is all the worse for them...

Gah, if LA had something like P2 it would not work. Think of it more like a version of youvision but more about popularity than now.

Plus I live in LA my Games are in LA. P2 much different than the games it is like facemanual mixed with Youvision. There are plenty of info that happens on it but majority is highly scrubbed and censored.

THere are also not a million Drones flying all around catching every image and loading it up to P2. Face it LA from the book is taken from a head line idea of what it is not the reall corporate back stabbing and secretive nature that is very real in modern LA.

Not all Johnsons are secretive and all that smart. Johnsons try to be anonymous, but if you even just take a look at a lot of missions adventures, many of them are bumbling idiots and it doesn't take a whole lot of digging to find out who they are. Once you get an identity, its not really abnormal that they have a lot of personal information available, both in and outside of corporate networks.

People are stupid. I don't see that changing a whole lot in the 2070s:)

Yes, i use those social media mostly as data search results. Both for Johnson (rarely) or targets. So they are data search on target - they can dig up a lot of info from old dating sites/interest groups/social networks/even games. That's quite realistic and also fun.

"OK, our target is on two dating sites, reads blogs about breeding animals, and thinks he's proxied himself so that no one knows about his subscriptions to Burro Sites in Aztlan." "Burros, as in Spanish for Donkey? What's so bad about that?" "It's what the Burro is doing. In full Sim. Let that be a lession to me, be careful what I click, I'm now searching for some Brain Bleach."

I was also thinking that there would be some time of image recognition database for police, etc. Where a decker can sneak in, and try and cross reference a picture to get Mr Johnson's real name. Would there be something like this also on shadowland?

RL Snow Fox subscribes to a few magazines she never reads just to confuse things like that.