Emma Muth

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Though I have, like most people, searched myself on the Internet before, I have never approached it asking, “Who does the Internet say I am?” As I began this assignment, I was curious— I had heard many people mention their high school athletics records, club-related activities, or other high-school-related results, and as someone who was homeschooled from preschool until high school graduation, I knew that would not be the case for me. In fact, I was fairly confident I would be happy with my online footprint and the privacy I'd achieved. Regardless, I set out, with only my name in my virtual hand, to see what I could find. While I did find confirmation that I have locked down my personal information fairly successfully, I left with new insight into information "leakage" and ethical implications of information accuracy.

Looking Through the Windows

A Restricted Perspective

At a young age, I learned to be protective of my online identity. When my parents helped me create my first Facebook page on my thirteenth birthday (and not a day sooner), they guided me through keeping it as private as possible and warned me against accepting friend requests from strangers. It's funny how these things from childhood persist— to this day, I feel a little unsettled if one of my social media accounts is set to public. As an artifact of this, according to my Internet searches, I virtually didn’t exist until I graduated from community college, which is the earliest photo I can find of myself by searching my name.

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Even my decade-old Facebook profile does not directly come up in any searches, though a rogue post—a prize drawing on Facebook that I won from a dentist in my hometown—and comment—me tagging a coworker in about a cat adoption day—did appear at some point. Even the twenty-word bio on my private Instagram, admittedly the most personal information that is discoverable, paints a semi-generic picture of a senior in college who is majoring in computer science, works at a library, is a Christian, and is either engaged or married as of last July (unclear from my bio alone). As I tried to read this imagining I was a stranger (much more difficult than I anticipated), it felt like peering in through a window— what you see isn't wrong, but there's a lot missing. You wouldn't know I have three sisters, that my best friend lives in Alaska and has a baby I've never met, that this May will be six years since my aunt died. I've been shaped by these elements of life, but you'd never know that by just peering through the window.

The Data Jackpot of LinkedIn

Offering a more detailed perspective is LinkedIn, the very first result you get when you search my name. Kudos to Google, it is also the most accurate and detailed search result on page 1, rising above the LinkedIn profile of an Emma Muth in Nevada and an Emma Muth from the 1940 census. Without even clicking on the link, it immediately tells the casual online wanderer that I work (and presumably go to school) at the University of Michigan. Once you click on the link, you can see a treasure trove of details— work and school history that essentially give away where I live (one of the reasons I was hesitant to create a LinkedIn in the first place) and where I've been professionally and educationally for the past six years. While this is the most extensive record of existence I could find, the perspective in many ways is just as limited as my twenty-word Instagram bio. You know that I attend the University of Michigan and have been involved in a few different roles as a student instructor, but what isn't clear is my passion for teaching. It's clear that I've worked as a library clerk for about four years, but no one would know how much I love that job, that I've actually worked at the library in total for nine years, and I'm already emotional about having to quit after I graduate. First looks can be deceiving— despite having more detail, my LinkedIn page is still only another window.

Master of My Data... Or Not

Information "Leaks"

All these results were ones I expected, more or less. However, a particularly surprising result showed me that information “leaks” may be more common than I realized. On the first page of search results was a wedding website called The Knot with my name and my fiancé's name. I am getting married this year, but we created our wedding website through a different company entirely, so my interest was piqued. When I clicked on it, I found it wasn’t our entire wedding site, but rather just our Target wedding registry with our names and our wedding date. I was left wondering when I unknowingly signed off on Target sharing that information with The Knot. While our official wedding website did show up on the first-page search as well, it was well below this link. Information I wanted and intended to share was less readily accessible than something I didn’t even know I had shared. We’ve talked in class about the obfuscation of how our information is used introduced by many Terms and Conditions documents and the question of where the responsibility falls—on the user to read the full disclosure of how their information is being used or on the distributors of the technology to make it more easily consumable. While this is a question outside of the scope of this exposition, I believe the practicality of sifting through and deciphering these types of documents should be questioned. If I had a more decipherable snapshot of how my wedding website would use my information, this could have been an expected result and not felt like an information "leak," a snippet of information in the digital world that felt out of my control. While I don't mind people knowing we registered for a muffin tin, the issue is not what kind of information I unknowingly released, but that I had no idea.

Am I In Control?

What is the ethical difference between leaks and simply inaccurate information? While consulting Data Brokers, I compared and contrasted this difference. The supposedly glowing reviews, ranging from “I found out my husband was a cheater!” to “I reconnected with my long-lost sister!” were peppered with warnings and sensationalized pop-ups about what you might be on the verge of finding out.

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I admit the dramatized warnings made me laugh—as if I was going to unearth world-shattering revelations about myself—but simultaneously I wondered how many people had found truth or, in contrast, been led astray by the results. For example, it listed multiple cities and alternate names for me, but only one in each category was correct. If it couldn’t even guarantee my nicknames were correct, what if someone believed all its claims about my dating profiles (which don’t exist) or arrest record (also nonexistent)? Another data broker claimed a phone number my family had not used in at least a decade was first reported in 2019 and connected to me. Naturally, I started thinking—when did I put that phone number out there? How did they get it, but not until 2019? And if I felt uncomfortable with this allegedly salacious report or my old phone number being displayed, was I powerless to remove them? It turns out the answer is no. For many of these sites, including the one I used, you do have the option to request information removal. However, as they note themselves, you are not scrubbing these details from the Internet, just ensuring the results don't appear through their sites. If you believe their claims that their information comes from public records, it's still available for people to find if they are looking.

Conclusion

I am fairly happy with my online presence. Most of what I found was accurate, and even if it wasn't, the inaccuracies weren’t damaging. However, I have a new wariness around what I am actually agreeing to for every account I create now. Additionally, I was reminded that at any given moment of online observation, the chances are high that we are only seeing a window of someone's life. And while some of these windows are curated and intentional, some are leaks, either not intended to be released by the subject or completely false.

I’m glad I did this before my wedding this fall because I can’t help but wonder how the stability of this information will shift after my last name changes. How long will it take them to catch up with me? How long until they associate my new last name with my “old” identity? What new leaks will be released, whether by inadvertent lack of knowledge about how companies are using my data, like with The Knot, or because of website error, like with Instant Checkmate and other Data Brokers? As “the very distinction between online and offline [becomes increasingly] blurred”[1], vigilance in our own awareness and discretion when analyzing and judging others' online profiles will be essential. After all, we're only looking through a window.

References

  1. "Floridi, Luciano. The Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics. Cambridge University Press, 2010, 8.