Digital Tattoo


Alright – so this week I had to do some data mining of myself on the internet. What that means is that I go online to do some research by inputting my name into a search engine which finds different locations on the world wide web that could be related to me. In that process it identifies plenty of web services that focus on gathering personal information about the subject, from arrest records, phone numbers, addresses, demographic data, census data, or a wide variety of other information.

I used one of the most popular search engines in the world which is google.com. I started my search by simply plugging in my name and immediately saw my picture on top as one of the suggested images. Further down I could find links to my twitter, instagram, and facebook accounts. Usually when I have done similar searches for someone else, I have to add at least the city they live in to help narrow down my search. Otherwise it becomes very hard to find the person you are looking for. But in this case, I guess it is smart enough to know the location where I am running the search from (by the IP I would think), and it provides me with people that have my name in my area.

I took it a bit further by going into some of those web services that pride themselves in having the most complete records on people such as, mylife.com, beenverified.com, instantcheckmate.com. Let me first warn you that navigating across these websites is extremely tricky and deceiving. I have never paid for any of these services so I can’t talk as to how inclusive the final reports are but, the free versions contain pretty basic information. Make sure you have enough time to wait for the “final reports” as it usually takes several minutes and multiple clicks before you can see some meaningful data.

The bottom line is how easy it can be to get a plenty of what could be considered personal data by simply “googling” someone’s name. It can be helpful when you are the one “stalking” someone else, but scary when you realize anybody could find out about you too. I was surprised how mylife.com had all my addresses, which included ones that I had even forgotten about.

More importantly the thing to remember out of all this is that the internet is a huge dumping ground of data and we need to be mindful of what we put out there because anybody could access it. There are things like addresses, age, and public records that there is not much we can do to keep them private. But we can take control of some things like modifying the privacy settings in the different social media sites that we use where we put a lot more personal information.



Additional Resources:

1. https://www.lifelock.com/learn-internet-security-ways-to-help-protect-your-personal-information-online.html

2. https://searchengineland.com/removing-your-personal-information-from-google-55014

3. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/29/how-to-download-a-copy-of-everything-google-knows-about-you.html

Comments

  1. NMZumpanoOctober 11, 2019 at 12:35 PM

    Is this something you feel we should be teaching students to do?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Lucia DuranOctober 12, 2019 at 8:02 PM

      I do believe we should teach students about the privacy issues that the internet poses nowadays. When I was growing up the internet was not around, so we didn't have to worry about its dangers. But our young ones do need to be taught that everything they put out there has the potential of affecting them (positively/negatively) now or in future.

      Delete
  2. Geri BartuchOctober 11, 2019 at 5:29 PM

    Lucia, You are so right about the internet being a dumping ground and us being mindful of what we are putting out there! I think this is really difficult for our students to understand. I hope as they get older, they understand the importance of editing what they post online. Their job may depend on it!

    ReplyDelete

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