Difference between revisions of "Kierra Davis"

Revision as of 16:53, 19 February 2021

Introduction

I don’t really use social media. I had an Instagram account once when I was 12 years old (because that’s when Instagram was really taking off and everyone made one) but I deleted that within a year and haven’t looked back. I’ve never had Facebook or Twitter – I really wanted Facebook when I was young, but my mother told me I couldn’t make one until I was 15 years old, and by the time I turned 15 I wasn’t interested anymore. I’m not on Reddit, TikTok, or LinkedIn. The only social media I have is Snapchat, and that’s pretty small and managed – I only add my friends (and a select few family members).

My initial reasons for never really becoming involved with social media weren’t particularly rooted in privacy concerns. I just didn’t want the hassle of trying to maintain an online social persona and curated image of myself. But as I’ve gotten older and learned about how many privacy complaints others have with social media, I’ve been happy that I don’t really use any of it. And I liked that people couldn’t really find out much about my personal life.

But that’s not necessarily true. I didn’t expect to see many search results actually related to me since I don’t really have an online presence, but instead what I found was more personal than anything I would have been comfortable with if I did use social media. I realized that despite how much I try to manage what others know about me, there still exists a lot of information that I don’t have any control over.

The Search

Photo of me and the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society on Google

I did a few different searches using my name and adding on “Muskegon”, my hometown, as well as “University of Michigan”. Googling just my name returned a lot of results that aren’t related to me. While there were rarely people in my school growing up who shared the same name as me, Kierra Davis is actually a really common name and it would be difficult for anyone to pick apart all of the search results to find the right one. There are tons of images for Kierra Davis, but none of them are me. The search including my hometown did return an image that was me, a photo taken at an event with my community college’s honor society members. I also saw a lot of LinkedIn and Facebook profiles for Kierra Davis, but of course none of those were my own.

A few search results down I did find some information that was actually about me. There were a few articles that related to my academics and activities in high school and in college. My name also came up on the website for a neuroscience lab I worked as a research assistant for in 2019, as well as on a website called Weebly, where the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program hosted a blog in 2019. I had to write a few mandatory blog posts when I participated in UROP at that time, and I guess now those are archived on the internet forever for anyone to find if they really want to read them (they’re not very good).

There were some results that came up unrelated to school activities, which were also actually related to me. A website called The Knot came up – it’s a wedding planning website that I had made an account on before I got married in 2019, and it shows my name as well as my husband’s and our wedding date and location. That is, of course, all accurate information because it’s information I had added myself when I signed up. It was surprising that such an obscure thing managed to make its way to Google’s search results.

The more concerning results were websites showing addresses - there were a few of those, such as the Michigan Database website. The address I lived at in Muskegon was there with my name and age. My mother and brother also came up as they still live at that address now, and the landline phone number was there alongside my mother’s cell phone number. Some of my relatives and their own information were on the same page, as well as additional speculations about other people related to me and my family. Much of this information was accurate – the address, the ages, the relatives. But there were also several inaccuracies, like previous addresses I lived at; the Michigan Database website stated that I previously lived in Florida, which is impossible because I only ever lived in Muskegon. And the numbers listed for my family members weren’t all correct, nor the whole list of my own possible relatives.

One of my addresses in Ann Arbor also came up in my Google search. The address for the previous apartment I lived at in 2018 before my current one was listed, and this was fully accurate. I assume it was there because it is tied to my voter record, and the first time I was able to and registered to vote was at that address. I couldn’t find my current apartment listed anywhere, but it’s probably only a matter of time before that’s searchable too.

Reflections

It seems that if someone knew what they were searching for, they could find accurate information about me online. There is definitely the possibility that I might get confused with another Kierra Davis; I think it’s a good thing my name is so common that I am not as easy to find, but also there is the risk of someone developing ideas about who I am through mistaking me for someone else. Some results came up mentioning sex offenders and there was an ad about Kierra Davis arrest record, so it certainly would not be great if a person looking for information on me thought that more negative-themed results correctly connect to me. But if someone has just a bit more information related to me, it doesn’t seem too difficult to find relevant results. Knowing my college, hometown, or even age could provide data about my academics or address.

I’m not too concerned with the articles related to academics. I think it paints a pretty accurate depiction of someone who has cared about school and pursuing an academic career, and the programs and research I’ve participated in. I don’t have control over these articles – I didn’t write them and I can’t take them down. But I don’t think they cause any harm, and they could even be beneficial if an employer decides to search me up. The blog posts I wrote for UROP on Weebly is also content I don’t have control over since I can’t take it down, and while I’m not thrilled about having these less-than-perfect blog posts on the internet, it’s still not really a big deal.

However, I do think it’s really worrying to see so much information about my addresses and family members. I knew it existed, but I thought a lot of this information would be behind a paywall and not easily accessible unless someone really wanted it. So it’s disconcerting to find that it actually isn’t difficult to figure out the names of my relatives and where I live. I’m glad my cell phone number isn’t online, but my mother’s is, and I would guess it wouldn’t be that hard for my own number to suddenly appear on one of these sites. And my current address might not be accessible right now, but again, it probably won’t take much time before it is, and I’m not comfortable having my past addresses and my family’s addresses out there. It’s not that I think I have anything to worry about right now, but it isn’t hard to imagine the ways in which this information could be abused, especially as a woman.

And it doesn’t seem like it would be easy to scrub the internet of this personal information, either. After doing these Google searches, I decided to look into how I could remove mine and my family’s addresses and numbers from these sites, but the suggestions were pretty bleak and depressing. A lot of articles written to guide the scrubbing process stated that it’s practically impossible to ever fully remove that information. I came across a post on Reddit that had an extremely long (and ongoing) list of sites that store addresses and related information, which simply doesn’t seem feasible to sift through.

The privacy statements of the websites themselves make it difficult to remove your information, too. One of them on cyberbackgroundchecks.com failed to even allow me to submit a request for removal. And many people said that they’ve successfully removed their information from a website, and then checked back a few weeks later to find it there again.

So while I think I’ve done a good job of managing what I can control on the internet, it doesn’t seem to matter much when there’s plenty more I can’t do anything about.