Woman exposes how scarily easy it is to find people's personal info from TikTok

We’re all warned about the perils of the online world and how hackers lie at every turn.

Those of us who take a pretty laissez-faire approach to digital security – blindly accepting cookies and signing up for every available newsletter – shouldn’t be too surprised to learn that our personal information is easy to track down.

But those of us who tread more carefully and do our best to cover our tracks shouldn’t be complacent either, as one TikTok user has revealed.

The social media sleuth, who goes by the name Kahn, has become a legend on the video-sharing platform thanks to her ability to unearth people’s details based on the most minimal bits of information.

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Her mission? To find out strangers’ birthdays, even if all she has to go by is a generic username and a picture of a dog.

Head to her profile and you’ll see a stream of clips in which she takes on fellow TikTokers who ask her to “do [them]”.

Her most popular challenge, which racked up 12.6 million views in less than two weeks, was what she considered to be “the most unhinged one [she’s] done so far”.

This one was set by a user called “knoughpe,” who had nothing on their profile except a cartoon image of what Kahn assumed to be their face.

“No first or last name, no videos, nothing,” she stressed. “All I knew was that they wore glasses and their username was knoughpe.

“So I took the name knoughpe and I put it into Google.”

She then explained that if you enter a TikTok username into the search engine, it shows you all the videos they’ve commented on. And, lo and behold, the first comment she found from knoughpe gave her a clue that they were from the sunshine state.

The mystery person had written: “Very nice!! Living on the east coast of Florida since ‘94 so you’re definitely safe!!”

She then unearthed a second hint from another of knoughpe's comments: that they had a degree in engineering.

Kahn explained that she then returned to TikTok and dug out the profile of knoughpe's first follower: a user called “hooraybeemo”.

She explained: “I went to hooraybeemo’s followers on TikTok, and the first three people who followed them include our friend knoughpe and then two people who have their full names in their TikTok usernames.”

To cut short a dazzlingly long story – which involves misleading last names, among other plot twists – she managed to find these two strangers on Facebook and Instagram but still couldn’t track down knoughpe.

That was, until she went through the second person’s Facebook photos and looked through all the people who had “liked” them.

“I was like, all I know about knoughpe is that they’re from Florida and wear glasses,” she continued excitedly.

“I was literally scrolling through Facebook profile pictures of people who were liking their photos and only one person looked similar in their profile picture to that cartoon on TikTok.”

Pointing to an image of a bespectacled man behind her, she said: “And guess what this person does? They were an audio engineer based on posts I saw, and they live in Florida.”

Announcing that she was “positive” she’d found her knoughpe, she added that she’d also worked out his birthday thanks to messages he’d received.

“April 25th, 1990. Happy Birthday, Ethan!” she gushed.

Wow.

Another, which has racked up 3.2 million views and more than 280,000 likes in a month, saw her challenged by someone called “nik51612”, who proudly declared that “nothing [was] linked” to her profile so “shoot ya shot.”

And shoot it Kahn did.

She replied: “Nikki, I found out that you were born on January 21st, 1992 in about four minutes. And here’s how…

“You made a TikTok about how much you love your fiancé and he replied in the comments, ‘I love you baby.’ His TikTok username is his full name, but his full name is very common, so I looked at another TikTok of yours, and you tagged a bunch of your friends in it [...] so I looked at a couple of theirs and they are actually from Georgia.

“So I figured you were from Georgia, too, so I went on Facebook and I typed your fiancé’s full name in with ‘Georgia’, and I found him, I found photos of you two.”

She continued: “When I went on your Facebook, your friend Bethany said, ‘Happy Birthday, to this little firecracker!’ [...] and it was on January 21st.

“I couldn’t figure out what year you were born, but then all I had to do was look at your Facebook URL and it’s your full birthday – the numbers are your full birthday: January 21st, 1992.

“So you are 30.”

We’re told our choice of friends says a lot about us. It turns out that’s truer than you might think.

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