Talk:Lauren Zielinski

Zi's comments

Hi Lauren,

I thought it was very interesting that you were not able to find much information about yourself. The way that you assemble the report leads to a thoughtful conclusion about privacy vs. data accuracy and transparency. The headers really helped to break up your search into manageable chunks, and you have effective images to help prove your point.

In terms of writing and formatting, I think you could benefit from a few more images. However, I do have deeper questions for you, especially given the fact that it does appear that you use social media. How do you construct your social media identity? Is it a more accurate reflection of yourself than the data broker gives? Is it "authentic to you"? Or is it performative in some other way? Hearing this would allow me to better understand your personal approach to your own data. Additionally, if someone where able to "string together" your data identity across multiple platforms and data brokers, would they be able to fish out something closer to the true you? Adding these personal touches would round out your essay contents.

Danny G's Comments

Lauren, I enjoyed reading your wiki page and learning about your experience searching and creating your online identity profile. Like Zi, I was also surprised that you were not able to find personal information from the paid reports. I only used free reports from Instant Checkmate, US Identify, and a couple other data brokers, but was able to find my age, associates, phone numbers, and other information. You mentioned how the brokers got your interests completely wrong. On one of the broker sites, I was given arbitrary scores out of 100 for categories such as "propensity to shop online," or "propensity to make environmentally conscious decisions. I was equally confused how brokers came to these conclusions, and if they were actually construed based off of real data, or just fabricated. You didn't mention this in your blog, but Facebook Ad Preferences was a really useful source to creating my online profile, and provided me with a lot of accurate information in how FB categorizes me, including my areas of interest based off of my Facebook activity. Perhaps this source could have given you a more accurate representation of your interests, besides hunting and fishing.

In this blog, you mostly just discuss your findings from various brokers, data engines, and social media platforms. While it is interesting to see how much information you were able gather, and to assess if your online identity matches your real offline identity, it would have been useful if you had connected more ideas and theories about ICT ethics and values in your wiki page. Perhaps incorporating quotes and concepts from readings throughout the semester may give more of a deeper understanding of your online profile, how you created it, and how you searched it in order to understand your anonymity and privacy. I'd also reformat the page, by creating subcategories for the individual data brokers, and would also cut down on your discussion of other on profiles with the same name as you, since they don't pertain to your online digital profile.