User:Yunhaow

I am Yunhao Wang, junior at the University of Michigan, majoring in Computer Science. I lived in China for my first 18 years and have spent 3 years in the US to pursue a college degree.

I do not regard myself as an outgoing person. Though in some cases, I must be outgoing to be accommodated to circumstances. As a result, I do not hang out with my friends quite often. In most of the time, social media websites are a place where I can find much fun. I even found that there is everything I need to support my needs. For emotional needs, there are websites that individual users upload high-quality videos and blogs. There are even virtual friends that you can meet online, whom I can share thoughts and feelings with, which I feel difficult to share with my actual friends. For physical needs, there are online shops that have more goods than actual shops. Sometimes I even think I had better stay on the Internet rather than in reality. However, there are numerous problems when using Internet services. Most problems can be concluded as one question, “what kind of information do I want to share online?” It makes no sense that someone can live well in the Internet community while not sharing any personal information. However, it depends on me how much information I would like to share. Or more generally, at what level do I care about my privacy? I am very serious about my data that become public on the Internet. To be honest, I have a quite complicated feeling about it. On the one hand, I do not want to let everybody know who I am and what my personality is. So I make a lot of effort to make this work. First, I set up my social media accounts to a relatively high privacy level so that only my close friends can see the whole contents. Some people I am familiar with can see part of the contents. As of strangers, they are forbidden from my accounts and even my profiles. As for accounts that intend to be public to everyone, I usually try not to set up an account to access the contents and get the services. In case that I have to register for an account, I always control myself not to publish anything using those accounts, even functions like “reposts” and “likes”. These habits work quite well until now. They help a lot to isolate numerous intended or unintended disturbances and troubles, even though a few advertisements sent by robots. On the other hand, I still prefer to sacrifice part of my personal information in exchange for better customer services. I actively participate in software testing. When there are bugs or something that affects user experiences, I will report them to the developers immediately with my email address in the hope that these issues will be solved perfectly. I also actively respond to user experiences surveys, where a large amount of user activity history will be collected and uploaded. Though this is the case, I still like to do these things. I believe that it is a good thing that more people will benefit from this through a bit of sacrifice.

However, sometimes the information leak cannot be avoided. We can easily find that there are many third-party companies that provide part of the services. For example, some companies may use a different system provided by a third-party to deal with transactions. No matter whether you agree with it or not, you have to use the service. During this process, my personal information will be shared with this third party. Since those companies are relatively small, they potentially need to utilize that information to make a profit while I have no other choice. In the most severe case, that is one of the reasons why credit card fraud happens several times. Also, I am still receiving emails not related to any business I involved in. They are so frequent that those important emails are just submerged into junk emails. These situations really bring too much inconvenience to both my studies and life. Another issue is associated with my resident's address. Though I do not think I provide any business with my resident address, and for those provided, I believe they have a secured method to store customer information. However, when I check my mailbox, there are always target mails that have my name and mailing address on it. These emails often include an invitation about an “organization” that seems very formal and serious. But in reality, it has no admission thresholds, and it does not have any practical effects and influences. It is really difficult to handle this issue since there is no way to “remove me from the subscript list”. As a result of these, I am paying more and more attention to my privacy issues.

To be honest, I was amazed that I could find nothing about me on the general web. While I believe this is partly because of the measures I took, a common name also helps me protect my privacy to some extent. Though I do not have an English name, such a spelling is still common enough for Google to generate billions of search results. In this case, not everyone can locate me accurately unless people familiar with me who get some typical information. Even in that case, it may take a great effort to do that.

Is such a high-level privacy a good thing? For me, it really depends on the time period. In past times, I think that is good. I can easily separate my virtual social life with my actual one. I can behave what I want to behave in the virtual world, even pretending to be another person, as long as I do not share any personal information. It also works reversely. Since my borderline between actual worlds and virtual worlds is very clear and exact, people who recognize me, in reality, will not recognize a “different” me virtually. So any potential confrontation and embarrassment will be avoided. However, if there is a period when I need to find a job, deliver a speech, or any other period when I need to show some influence, I have to use Google to fortify some credibility. If there is nothing about me on the Internet, People will not believe me. Also, if I will apply for graduate studies, admission officers will definitely search for my published works. It would negatively impact my decision if there are no search results. Therefore, I should really pay attention to my degree of online exposure.

There is a question, “Are we more or less than or information?” For me, the answer is yes. After all, I could not find any typical information on Google. One of the important factors is that due to the separation of my virtual world and the actual world, one cannot totally understand me without knowing “different” me in two “different” worlds. In this case, I am quite beyond the information about me. Also, there are some secrets which I will tell nobody about. It means that if I never share part of my personal information, I am then always more than information.

This is still not a comprehensive data identity report anyway due to various reasons above. Nevertheless, this is still Yunhao Wang, junior in Computer Science major at the University of Michigan. He still treats his privacy as one of the priority things and is very annoying about information leaks, such as credit card, email address, and residence address. It works so well that he even cannot locate himself on the Internet. He has very complicated feelings about this condition. He feels comfortable now, but still worry about some influential situations. He also has a unique interpretation of the association between people and information.

It is always far from enough to understand me through the web!