Difference between revisions of "Jeremy Stark"

Revision as of 00:16, 19 February 2021

I've always thought that I was careful about what they posted online. From a young age I have participated in a wide variety of social media platforms. An unfortunately large amount of time each day is spent scrolling through Reddit, or talking to my friends on Facebook. Even with using these services, I have tried to limit what was shared. This is not because I think any of the information is going to damage me, or is too personal. Instead, I've tried to limit what was shown just because it makes me more comfortable knowing my Facebook information is only seen by people I know. As much as I've tried to limit what is available, I have always been worried that what little privacy settings I have control over were not enough to actually limit the available information. Through this project I was able to see that both my efforts to stay private have worked, and that what little information is available does represent me, however limited of a representation it is.

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Collecting Data

Google Search

Taking all of what I said into account, I knew that a google search might not be the most effective. In fact, searching for just my name did not reveal any data on me after looking at the first 10 pages. This was not totally surprising, as my name is not terribly unique. I tried adding my middle name, Brandon. However this resulted in a new problem. The vast majority of results were related to the character Bran Stark from Game of Thrones. After finally adding my city to the mix, I got my first result related to me. But even then I was not first on the list. What I found was my LinkedIn profile, one of the few sites where I had elected to make my information public due to the nature of the site. I would say that the LinkedIn Profile is fairly accurate, as its accuracy is important for the job market. I then tried using other terms, such as the name of my high school, Michigan, as well as my address. Besides the LinkedIn page, I found some old results from high school debate, and a profiling website that while it got my phone number, school, and age right, which was widely wrong about user IDs and emails. I also saw some information on my parents, but none of that was linked to me. So far it seemed as if my efforts to stay private had been working. [243]

Searching Websites

One thing I was expecting to see, but never found was references to my Facebook or Instagram accounts. I know I asked them to hide a lot of my information from the public, but figured it didn't do much as I don't exactly trust Facebook. I decided that searching these websites might change the results, but it did not. I then checked to see my settings, and found some that I wished to change, but overall Facebook was behaving exactly as I had hoped it would.

My settings before this project. The last setting is one of the most important for privacy.

I tried other websites. Youtube and other search engines yielded similar results. This was almost shocking. No matter how hard I tried to control my privacy online, I figured that it would be futile. Seeing that going through these settings actually impacted my identity on the web was not something I expected to find.

Test

Searching for Usernames

What the available information says about me

Why I choose to limit public information