Kevin Chen
My name is Kevin Chen. According to howmanyofme.com, there are over 1.1 million people named ‘Kevin’ in the United States, and ‘Chen’ is the fourth most common surname in the world if we take into account the variants of the form. Although I knew my name was pretty common, I was not fully aware of it until I reached college, where I even struggled to come up with a UM uniqname due to the abundance of students named ‘Kevin Chen’ who previously or were already attending the University of Michigan.
Having a common name is not necessarily a negative feature all the time. For example, it is hard to gather consistent information about someone who has a common name because data about this person could very well be about a different person with the same name, especially if the data are just blocks of text. This is beneficial because the data are then ambiguously clumped together, which would make it hard to stalk a particular profile. That is the case for me.
With that being said, I was not surprised to see the dearth of information about me in the top results from a search query for my name. The documents about the more “relevant” Kevin Chens seemed to rank higher than the documents about me. In addition, it seemed that any information about me was buried among the other results. While this may seem benign at first glance, there are also cons to this situation. The lack of information means that people who search for me only have this information to build an identity, which can be skewed because of a lack of content and foundation. Because there are so many profiles with my name, people could also inherently have a preconceived notion of my identity based on the profiles they have seen before. My data identity is rather limited and difficult to find without much context, but it is still enough to falsely portray my true identity.
My Social Networks
Growing up, my interests with social media never fully blossomed compared to my friends and family. In fact, the only social media profiles I have are Facebook and Snapchat, and even so I am not very active on the platforms either. On Facebook, my account is five years old, but I have only changed my profile pictures twice in that time span. I have also made sure to limit the visibility of my profile from random strangers and display information only to my friends, which explains why my profile is unsearchable from a Google search. However, I sometimes get tagged in photos or other posts and who knows how Facebook processes that data, which is its own can of worms to handle. For Snapchat, it simply lost meaning to exchange pictures with friends over time, and I never felt comfortable exposing my location for its Snap Map feature as well.
Although I do not reveal my personal accounts a lot, I often forget to manage my professional accounts like LinkedIn. It is also quite annoying when job applications lead you to create additional accounts and then spam me with alerts in my emails. Finding these professional accounts are the only results that I will not find surprising, and the details displayed on those profiles only reveal my academic accomplishments.
