HUMINT is intelligence collected from people — interviews, informants, and direct human interaction — as opposed to technical or open sources. It is one of the classic intelligence disciplines and predates the internet by centuries.
OSINT and HUMINT are complementary: open-source research often generates leads that human sources confirm, and interviews surface details that send an analyst back to the records. Ethical OSINT never uses deception (pretexting) to extract information from people.