Kevin Chen
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 have limited information to build an identity for me, 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.
Contents
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. For Snapchat, it simply lost meaning to exchange pictures with friends over time
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.
Searching Myself
When prompted to do research on myself, I was not really sure what to expect. One part of me wanted to believe I had done a great job so far of keeping a low profile in my life and only sharing the parts of my life I wanted to reveal. On the other hand, I also felt apprehensive that despite my efforts, my data had been exposed over the years from account information, emails, and browser cookies.
Search Query: 'kevin chen'
First, I searched my name through an incognito window on Google. As predicted, the top results from this query displayed profiles of various Kevin Chens—an artist, a doctor, and a professor—but none that were related to me. This was the case even after scrolling through the first ten pages of the results. However, this was not surprising since I do not publicize many personal accounts or websites. But it also makes me wonder how far I would need to index through the pages to find the first result that was relevant to me. Moreover, I even found results of documents related to individuals that did not have my name before I came across a page about me. Should I be satisfied that my data is hidden under all these other results, and it would take a lot of effort to find relevant information, or should I be angry that Google considers me as “not relevant” to the search query “kevin chen”?
Search Query: 'kevin chen west bloomfield'
I took a trip down memory lane and proceeded to modify the search query by entering the city I grew up in, expecting results about my activities in high school. Alas, I started to find results and information about me. More specifically, this included articles and websites about my extracurricular activities when I was in high school. There were also articles written about my performances and sports-related activities that I never knew existed. In one of the results, it leads to a website about my high school’s ping pong club, in which I am, after four years, still featured on the main page, shaking hands with my opponent before a tournament.
Search Query: 'kevechen'
Finally, I searched my UM uniqname. Surprisingly, this search query retrieved the highest number of relevant documents about me on the first page. The results include a link to my Medium account, a GitHub contribution, and my MCommunity profile. On the next page, it also provided a link to the course I am teaching as an Instructional Aide. This was a decent amount of information about me, and I was shocked by the results of the query. I was linked to all of these documents, but they were all recent updates and information about my life in the past five months. In one perspective, the information displayed were all true facts about me, but it is wrong to reason about my data identity based on information that was posted within a time span of five months.
Data Broker
Out of curiosity, I entered “Kevin Chen” and “Michigan” into a data broker site “fastpeoplesearch.com.” Interestingly enough, it did not find any profiles that matched my personal information. Even though there was not a profile about me, I was still alarmed that each profile included names of family members that the site claimed to have connections. It is definitely intimidating that there is software intended to purposefully exploit data about myself, but it is understandable that people can use it to know how much data they reveal about themselves online.
Analysis
Throughout this process, I learned that my data identity, though scarce in the number of documents, had a lot of substance. People who have access to those exact documents could easily piece together a persona of an individual named Kevin Chen who studied Computer Science at the University of Michigan, worked as an Instructional Aide for a course, and used to play ping pong. In fact, one would not even need all those documents to create that identity. However, that is exactly the repercussions of processing online data. A subtle word on a document that includes your name could possibly relate you to a crime that you did not commit. This one of the dangers of processing online data, but it is the type of information that many people will use and take advantage of.
Conclusion
Discovering the content of my data identity was a very enlightening process. Despite my continuing efforts to conceal my information as much as possible, it seems like any information leak could portray a new identity for me, even if the data does not resemble me anymore. I recall a lot of the results I found were posts and articles written when I was in high school. Although there is information online that could have been true at some point in my life, my personality and identity are constantly changing and evolving, an aspect that my data identity cannot keep up with.
Overall, my data identity consists of a mix of new and old information jumbled together and stored in a database. The information includes past events in high school as well as recent events in college. Thankfully, my personal data is mostly hidden from the public eye, and I intend to keep it that way. I would consider my data identity as inauthentic and portraying mostly only the information I choose to reveal about myself.
References
“Chen (Surname).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 9 Feb. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_(surname).
