Kevin Zheng
Intro In my own personal experience, having such a common name has held many frustrations. I’ve always wished to have a cool and unique name that I could proudly say belongs to just myself, but when it comes to data online and privacy, I guess having such a name has its perks. Hi, my name is Kevin Zheng.
I know what some of you may be thinking, “how is ‘Kevin Zheng’ a common name?” This may be simpler to understand if you are of Asian descent, and especially Chinese. There are two factors to this. First, my last name, ‘Zheng(郑)’, is a fairly popular family name in China. Secondly, out of all the English first names that Asian families typically choose from, ‘Kevin’ is also one of the more common first names among Chinese Americans. As a result, I am therefore one of many “Kevin Zheng’s” that definitely exist in America and I get a lot of jokes heading my way within the Asian community about my name.
Google ‘Kevin Zheng’ Now onto my Google search results. Since my name is pretty common within the Asian community, the idea beforehand of doing a Google search on my name seemed like an impossible task to try and find myself. To my amazement, doing a search on ‘Kevin Zheng’ on Google yielded some terrifying results. Although the search results weren’t completely accurate in pinpointing information about myself, I instead got a lot of results for a different ‘Kevin Zheng’. Now the scary thing is that this ‘Kevin Zheng’ I found is another ‘Kevin Zheng’ that went to University of Michigan - Ann Arbor. So even though Google couldn’t find me, it instead found another person by my name that also went to the same university. I was shocked. So was Google tracking my location and somehow knew that I went to University of Michigan so it thought that the other ‘Kevin Zheng’ might have been me? I really don’t know. If you continue looking around, the search page is mostly of this other ‘Kevin Zheng’ and his online identity(picture). You see his LinkedIn, his personal website, his Instagram, and also his Facebook. I was surprised though, however, that Google managed to get one piece of online information about me from this generic search and that was the Twitter account I created from when I took SI 110 last year (picture). On the other hand, the image results that came from this search was also to no surprise: a bunch of random Asian guys and then my Twitter profile picture. ‘Kevinzheng17’ Despite doing such a generic search on my name, Google still was able to find a piece of information about me when I thought it couldn’t given the cirucumstances. Now, I wanted to try something more specific to my identity by doing a Google search on the username that I use for my social media accounts to see what I could further find. This time, the top 3 search results were all my social media accounts. Searching for ‘kevinzheng17’ allowed Google to be able to find my Instagram, Twitter, and even my Youtube channel that I created when I was in elementary school, which is kind of embarrassing but oh well. One surprising search result was to my friend’s Instagram. My friend’s name is not even close to mine, but Google provided his Instagram in the search result because he had tagged me in one of his posts which I thought was interesting(picture). Google must have exhausted its primary searches for ‘kevinzheng17’ and now was looking for any extensions related to ‘kevinzheng17’ which probably pulled my friend’s Instagram into the search results. The remaining search results were again information about other ‘Kevin Zheng’s who were not me. The image results this time also did change, but not by much. There were way less images being shown with this narrower search with more of them being pictures related to me than the previous search on just my name. ‘kevinzhe’ I decided to do one last search, but this time on my school username to see if I could gather specific information in regards to my educational background at the University of Michigan. When I google ‘kevinzhe’, I actually get nothing at all related to my educational or professional background. I was surprised because this is probably just as specific as my previous search for ‘kevinzheng17’, but I get absolutely nothing about myself. All the search results are for social media profiles of other individuals who use ‘kevinzhe’ as their username. I even narrowed it down to ‘kevinzhe university of michigan’ and still got nothing. So if Google can’t find me as a student at University of Michigan, then how and why did Google suggest another ‘Kevin Zheng’ who also went University of Michigan in my first generic search? Was it purely coincidence? Reflections I was fully aware that finding google search results on specifically myself was going to be a challenge. I first began with a generic search and later into more specific searches through filtering to my social media username and later my school username. From these searches, it seems as though my online identity is not a very true representation of my true identity at all considering how little information is out there about me. My online identity suggests that I only have a social media presence on various platforms such as Instagram and Twitter, but that I have no other affiliations and belong nowhere else. It fails to capture my personal identity as well as my professional identity such as my education, my personal website, and my LinkedIn profile, which I consider to be more important and relevant data that would be shared with the world. My online identity overall reflects only the casual parts of myself rather than my whole self. As a result, I think I’ve done a good job of keeping my information private for the most part as I found no information online that particularly disturbed me. The only thing that really bothered me was the fact that Google suggested a different ‘Kevin Zheng’ from the same school and all of his online data identity but not mine.
Despite finding a lot more other ‘Kevin Zheng’s than myself, I learned a lot about how easy it is to access information about somebody through a simple Google search. Before now, I never would have thought that a person’s information, both private and public, would be so easily accessible. I feel like most people share the same thought and don’t even know that some of their own information is out there for anyone to just look up whenever they want. Even though there isn’t too much information out there about me to be concerned about, it’s still a terrifying thought to realize that I have little to no control over what information shows up to the public. I never chose for my Twitter account the show up if you just Google search my name, especially since it was meant solely for class purposes. In addition, the information that constructs my online identity is not accurate to my real identity at all and misses a lot of crucial aspects that build who I am as an individual.
After spending a day conducting various Google searches on myself, I have finally realized that my online identity did not fully portray an authentic version of myself. Is that a bad thing, though? I did end up finding some of my social media accounts, but that was only after an extensive and filtered down search of myself. I guess this means that most of my personal information is not easily found online somewhere as far as I know, however, it does disappoint me that my online identity paints me as an individual with not much influence on the world. When you google someone like “LeBron James” you get so much information about him, but you doing a Google search on me results in other ‘Kevin Zheng’s which makes it seem like they are “more important”. It really makes me feel small, but I’m honestly okay with that. My online identity only provides information about my social life with nothing at all about my academic or professional life as a college student, both of which I consider to be a big part of my identity currently. As a student at University of Michigan, academics has always been a crucial part of my real identity as well as my extracurricular activities doing sports and part-time jobs, but online, none of that seems to exists.
