User:Zhongfu
Contents
Introduction
I was actually kind of expecting to find much information about my online presence, or at least something I didn’t know was exposed online. As an international student from China, I have a very short history of using the current popular social media, such as Facebook and Snapchat. I have only been using Wechat and Sina for the first eighteen years of my life. Now, I’ve been in the US for roughly 4 years, and I hardly ever leave my personal information online, except on the big social media apps. Maybe it is because my name is very unique? Or maybe those people who have the same name as me also like to keep quiet on the internet, and they never leave their personal information online? Anyway, I’ve tried different data brokers, Google, or the search engines that people use in China, but I found very limited information related to my name.
If you typed my name, Zhongfu Bai, you will only find information about one person, and that is me. That information is what I have been released on social media. You can find my GitHub account, and that’s where I keep all my public projects. You can find my LinkedIn profile page, with all personal info about my career. The others are my Facebook and Instagram pages, and there are some photos of my American life that I upload in the last 4 years. Apart from those, there’s no other information related to my name. All of the info is what I purposely put onto the social media network, and I didn’t find any response from others or any tags about me. Of course, if someone wants to know about me, he/she could know that I'm a student and everything about what I have done in my career. He/she could also know my hobbies, by browsing my photos. Would they know me deep down? I don't think they will anything about what kind of person I am, and what's my personality. I could be any international student studying computer science in the US.
Baidu
Since I spend most of my life in China without access to Google, I guess it’s reasonable that there are not many things about me on Google. Then I will try the search engine that I used the most in China, which is Baidu. In case you are don't know, the people in China are banned to use the world's famous social media network, such as Google, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. Instead, China has its own media network, which includes platforms serve similar functionalities. Baidu is the most popular search engine in China, and it's also the second-largest search engine in the world. To my surprise, after I entered my Chinese name in the search engine, I didn’t get anything related to myself, but I found info about another person in Ordos City, Inner Mongolia. He’s currently running a meat market in his town. Other than that, there's absolutely nothing on Baidu really describes me. I found real-estate managers, business owners, or other people with various kinds of professions, but not a single website has information closed to me in real life.
Conclusion
Although I’ve tried my best to find my online presence on various data brokers or search engines, the amount of information related to my name is very limited. Except the data from that big social media network, I found absolutely nothing really related to me in real life. However, I’m pretty sure that there are tons of my personal information in the database of social media companies, and they are not exposed to the public. For example, Amazon must have my shopping record, Apple has all my photos and my Apple Pay credit card, Google has all my browsing history, etc. Even though I couldn’t find much info with search engines or data brokers, it doesn’t mean I don’t have an online presence, and my online presence is just secretly hidden, and if there's someone want to learn more about my real online presence, it's possible that he/she could do that.
