User:Adgupta
Contents
My Data Identity
Like many others, much of my life has been influenced by the internet and technology. I have always thought of my generation as the generation that lives on the internet. We have the ability to invent whatever version of ourselves we wish to be seen online, and interact with other people who have also portrayed themselves a certain way. Now days, it seems that many people are not cognizant of what kinds of data are publicly available, specifically regarding people. Online websites, known as data brokers, have been around for some time now scraping the web for any kind of data points they can pick up on people that are publicly available in order to turn a quick profit.
Most people, including myself, do not seem to care much about the processes occurring on the back end of these data collecting companies until bad news breaks regarding the violation of the privacy of hundreds of millions of people. The information being collected is cleaned, packaged, and sold to companies who then undoubtably use this data to show you targeted advertisements intended to drive their sales. More people should be outraged about this collection of data, given that it is in many ways a direct violation of your rights. In fact, I often wonder why I do not get upset despite actively knowing that the aforementioned activities are going on.
When asked to find as much information about myself online as I could and essentially act like a human data broker, I was excited. I would finally get to see myself the way the online world saw me and my online presence. However, when I began scavenging for my personal data on all of the reputable data broker sites, I was shocked at what I saw. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. These websites which claim to harvest tens to hundreds of data points on each individual they come across online had no information regarding me or my personal life.
I have never made it a point to privatize my life, much less abstain completely from having any of my data publicly available. Like most people, I have a Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and LinkedIn. I have posted enough of my own personal information on these sites for data brokers to happily scoop up and sell to advertisers and other companies. Somehow, I managed to not be a commodity for the data brokers. Confused, I decided to look into my personal information on the depths of the world's largest search engine, Google. The following are some of the things I found when trying to uncover myself online.
Who is Aditya Gupta?
According to myself, I am a junior at the University of Michigan studying computer science. I was born to Rohit and Sonia Gupta on October 25th, 1999 in Los Angeles, California. I currently live in Pleasanton, California. I went to Mohr elementary school, Harvest Park Middle School, and Amador Valley High School, all of which are in Pleasanton, California. Prior to attending the University of Michigan, I attended the University of California, Santa Cruz where I also majored in computer science and briefly swam on the NCAA swim team. According to the numerous data broker websites, none of this information about me is easily accessible despite no efforts on my end to obscure that information. In my endeavors attempting to find information, I stumbled on old articles mentioning my name for various swimming accolades, and even happened across my old college recruiting profile when I was choosing which school to swim at. The link for that profile can be found here
What Data Brokers Actually Have on Me
Every time I did attempt to search my name in these data brokers, it would report that there was an individual with the same name as me who was 38 years old, also living in Pleasanton, California. It is certainly a possibility that these data brokers aggregated my data, and stored the information under the profile of this other individual. This would explain a complete lack of my presence on the data brokers. I was unable to find any relevant, important, or even accurate information about myself during my plunge into the several google pages yielded by a search of my name. This implied that I actually have very little online presence as a person who has used the internet for a long time. The only thing that I was able to find which even came close to representing the real me was my Linkedin, which provided information that I willingly uploaded online for the public's viewership.
How private of a person am I if these data brokers cannot find my information?
As mentioned earlier, I have never gone out of my way to make myself a very private person, nor have I ever actively cared about the exploitation of my data (if that was even happening in the first place). Since there is no tangible information for me to work with regarding data brokers and what they know about me, it is difficult to write regarding their impact on my life and information.
My Google Results
I ran several google searches on myself, attempting to dig up whatever information I could. In the process, I found that my name is a very popular choice for many parents. There were over 2700 matches for people with the name Aditya Gupta on LinkedIn alone. Because of this, I had to go a few pages back in the general google search with keywords, "Aditya Gupta" to find anything about myself. On my LinkedIn, you will find all the information about me that I have chosen to make available to the public for the purposes of job recruiting. I worked at one of the world's largest cyber security company last summer, Check Point Software. This coming summer I will be working at ServiceNow, one of the fastest growing cloud companies in the world. My LinkedIn only contains information that I would like the public to know about my employment history and technical skills. It does not carry the footprint of more traditional social media outlets, such as age, address, hometown, friends, and other more personal data points.
Should You Believe Everything you see Online?
Something in particular I have thought about since entering this class, is the notion of what is truth, what is a lie, and what is bullshit. Harry Frankfurt discusses in On Truth, Lies, and Bullshit the intentions of bullshitters. I talked about how people can convey whatever version of themselves they would like to be on various social media platforms. Arguably no social media platform is more demonstrative of this than LinkedIn. Most of the tangible data that I spoke about regarding myself here came from the professional networking giant. I often wonder how much of what I consume as a reader and avid user on LinkedIn is legitimately representative of the people I see the content coming from. I often wonder if people think the same thing about my profile. Have I been deceiving people and showing the world a different version of myself? Many times I certainly feel that I have been. We as people online want other people to see the best parts of us online. I am certainly guilty of trying to add information that makes me seem greater than I actually am. Despite my attempts to make myself seem impressive on the internet, I don't believe I have bullshitted anybody. Frankfurt states that, "The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily intend to deceive us about is his enterprise." This notion made me think a lot regarding the public information that is available about people, specifically what people make publicly known about themselves. What version of myself do I really want the world to see on a site like LinkedIn? While I certainly made myself seem more polished online than I actually am, I certainly did not intend to deceive anybody, nor give off an illusion of fake success.
The Rest of the Google Results
Through Google, my facebook was also accessible with the addition of specific key words used to hone in on my data. I keep my facebook relatively dry of personal data, due to the recent revelations of data abuse on the platform. As expected, there is not much there to work with as well. My instagram, which is private, is the most telling platform as far as my daily life goes, but I still seldom post on Instagram either.
I was hoping that google results would tell more of my story, but it was not much more successful than the complete lack of data on my information on the data broker sites. I was genuinely surprised by these outcomes, since I was expecting to be inundated by all my social media posts, and public information I have willingly publicized over the years.
Conclusion and Analysis of Who I Am on the Internet
I have iterated over the course of this profile that I was shocked at the lack of data about myself on the internet. I have never taken extreme measures to prevent the viewership of my data on social networks, and various other websites. Despite several attempts to uncover information, I was still unable to find anything relevant. I have had time over the last week to think about what privacy means to me. Privacy is important, and a human right. We should be able to chose what people know and do not know about us. We should be able to chose what we put online, and what is consumed by certain people. Luciano Floridi and Matteo Turilli state that, "transparency is usually thought of as the process of disclosing a certain amount of information (or data) generated by an organization. Such information can be codified by means of different media. People outside and/or inside the organization can access such information and use it or their needs." In this time, individual privacy and transparency with the usage of data are more necessary than ever. I share the same view of Floridi and Turilli in that, we as the providers of data, should be the regulators of the transparency of our data, not the corporations. We share that data with who we wish to be able to see it.
While most people would be upset, and quite frankly, not surprised that their data is most likely being harvested by a data broker website, I have no reason to be upset since it seems that these data brokers know nothing about me. Knowing this is somewhat relieving, and strange. It makes me wonder why my information is not being harvested. Is my personal information not valuable enough for the companies to prioritize, or is it just that there are too many Aditya Gupta's to account for? These are questions I cannot answer without further investigation.
References
Luciano Floridi, Matteo Turilli, The ethics of information transparency
