Catherine Yang
Contents
Who I Am
It’s interesting and difficult to try to gauge what your online identity is like, and how others might perceive you if they find you online before meeting you in person. I have actually never thought too much about my digital presence, and yet I have occasionally dug quite deep into looking at someone else’s information online. To start off, my name is quite ordinary, and both my first and last name are common. “Catherine” is an old and consistently used English name, and “Yang” is a very common Chinese last name. Thus, when going into the process of searching myself up, I expected that I would probably be able to find some information about myself, such as social media accounts, but not enough information that someone could be sure their search results match me.
When I only look up “Catherine Yang” in non-incognito mode, the first results that show up seem to be about an author or journalist with the same name. This makes sense, since if someone is publishing articles or writing online for others to see, they would likely have a larger digital presence than me and most other people. Then, around the bottom of the first page, my LinkedIn account showed up. Because my LinkedIn mentions the university I attend, someone who is looking me up and knows what school I go to could probably be certain to a degree that I am the person on my LinkedIn profile. Something I noticed was that at the bottom of the search results, Google also suggests the search “catherine yang grey’s anatomy”. I think this is suggested because one of the characters in the TV show Grey’s Anatomy is played by the Asian American actress Cristina Yang. This suggestion is really interesting, and I wonder if Google would suggest a similar result if neither I nor the actress had an Asian last name. After looking at a few of the first pages of the search results, it seems like most of the results were referring to doctors and medical professionals named “Catherine Yang”, and so the only information I really found about myself in the first few pages was my LinkedIn profile.
Google, Incognito Edition
I then looked up my name in incognito mode, and I was a bit surprised to find that the results were exactly the same, at least for the first few pages. Then, I went on my phone in private mode and used data instead of wifi and had the same search results on the first few pages. However, as the page number increased, the results started to be slightly different, and I still couldn’t find any search results that actually corresponded to myself. It was interesting that even on my phone, my LinkedIn profile still appeared on the first page of results. Even when I am not in private mode, I am not signed into any personal accounts on Safari, and I also turned my wifi off when searching. This means that there is definitely a lot of other data that helps Google identify me, and possibly my school and location.
After only looking up my full name, I wanted to try to see if I could find any other social media accounts, and so I Googled “Catherine Yang Facebook” in non-incognito mode on my computer. No relevant results showed up for the first few pages, so I refined my search to “Catherine Yang Facebook university of michigan”. Interestingly enough, I still couldn’t find my Facebook account and instead the first result that showed up was for someone named “Katherine Yang” who attends the University of Michigan. However, I don’t remember changing any privacy settings on my Facebook, and it says on my Facebook that I attend the University of Michigan, so I wonder why I couldn’t find any information about my Facebook. In fact, by the time I was looking at the second page of results, they were not even related to Facebook anymore.
My Hometown
Then, for my last search, I decided to Google my full name along with my hometown, and the results honestly surprised me a lot. For some reason, the first two results were both my LinkedIn accounts, but the descriptions were different. The first result was titled “Catherine Yang - Mission San Jose High School - Fremont...” and the second result was titled “Catherine Yang - UX Designer - Design Clinic | UM School of …”. I am not sure if this is just a glitch, but regardless, I think the implications are really interesting. Although this is just my own hypothesis, I think the first result showcased my high school in the title instead because I specified my hometown in the search bar, and clearly my high school was in my hometown. It seems like the second search result is just what a description of my LinkedIn would typically be. It seems like Google or LinkedIn is personalizing what the headlines of search results are to cater to what someone searched, which is pretty scary to think about. If you know even one detail about someone and search that detail along with their name, Google could immediately point you to a relevant search result and even change the literal headline to capture your attention. This brings up a lot of ethical issues with personalization and privacy, and I wonder if anyone else has experienced something similar as well.
Conclusion and Reflection
After doing several searches to attempt to gauge what my online presence looks like, I can definitely conclude that it is quite uncertain and not wholly representative of me. I was surprised that I could essentially only find my LinkedIn account, even though I rarely even use it and don’t think it’s very prominent in my life. Additionally, even without specifying “LinkedIn” in the search, Google still showed my LinkedIn profile in results, and yet when I made a very specific Google search with both the terms “Facebook” and “university of michigan”, I could not find my Facebook profile at all, which I use daily. I also felt a bit relieved when trying to find information about my digital presence because my name is quite ordinary and common. I think I would be much more anxious about my identity online if I had a more unique name, since then it’s much more likely that someone who searches my name can be sure the results match me. Overall, I think that if someone were to look me up, they wouldn’t find anything that tells them who I really am and what I do. Although this makes me feel some relief, I definitely want to be more aware of how I present myself online, both intentionally and unintentionally, seeing as information about me could be nothing more than a few clicks and words away.
