Difference between revisions of "Nicolas Figueroa"

Revision as of 22:22, 18 February 2021

My absence from social media during high school was the result of overwhelming self-consciousness and fear of being judged by the world around me. I had used Facebook for a few years along with Twitter in middle school, now both of which have long since been deleted. My Instagram doesn’t contain my real name and holds a lonely picture of my beloved car. I have made a gradual and deliberate transition away from using social media since graduating high school in 2016 in order to focus my energy on connecting with people around me. I became far less shy after working at my first job and discovered the real difference between meeting people in real life as opposed to online where I much prefer the former. My goal for my digital identity is to be as inconspicuous as possible for the sake of trying to prevent distractions from the real world. My burning question is: does my digital identity reflect these intentions and will my findings correlate with a change in personal experience outside of the internet?

They Call Me Nico

I think my name is the best place to start, concerning the real world. I love telling people that, no, Nico isn’t my real name, along with explaining how I’m not from somewhere cool, just my dad is. Names try to be our unique identifiers, but that doesn't apply here considering the breadth of the internet. My name is very common where my dad is from but sparsely heard here in the United States, which makes it easy to dismiss results from any search engine that appear in Spanish because I’ve never had a real identity in South America, let alone a digital one.

There are plenty of other identifying traits that are employed on the internet, and in order to better critique my findings through search engines I want to include some personal qualities which I feel define me. I love to code, play tennis and walk my dog. My car breaks all the time and I love to fix it. My family all lives in Ann Arbor and they are much cooler than I am, so I won’t be surprised when they show up more than I do. I attended Washtenaw Community College before coming to the University of Michigan, and I graduated high school in this town as well in 2016. I am hoping that this is the maximum depth of information which is revealed through Google and Bing.

The Hunt

Methodology

My high level goal while building this digital identity was to critique how well I have stayed out of search engines, foremost because I already know that I don’t have any social media profiles. I tried to do a range of queries and speak only about the few that returned results. For both search engines I started with “Nico Figueroa” and then expanded on the entry to include more intimate details in the hopes of uncovering dark secrets. The most detail I appended to my name was my hometown, high school and other details that might be plausible to discover from talking to me in real life.

A Whole Lot of Nothing

The most expected results from Bing are the first blog post I wrote for a class at the University of Michigan, SI410, a few weeks ago, along a few articles about my tennis career in high school. There is one picture that is captioned as containing me, but the link is broken so I can't yet claim any fame that could be attributed to the photo. These initial results align well with the scope in which I feel comfortable being represented online and although the blog post I wrote reveals some details about my workplace, I believe in the transparency of a company with its community. So far, no discomfort has been discovered.

False Positive

Bing uncovered one result that gifted me some misgivings: a search engine listing for mylife.com, which described exactly my age, an address and the names of all my immediate family! It showed up at the cost of "Nicolas Figueroa Ann Arbor", which would be an easy leap for anybody checking up on me. I will absolutely admit to being anxious to click the link, but we all know that the story must come first.

A screenshot from mylife.com, showing an unsettling "Reputation Score". The scores are allegedly generated by members of the site but are unable to be viewed without signing up.

I felt a small bit of relief when the page loaded, revealing data which was out of date and clearly gathered from public government records. The address posted was the one on my driver's license from when I still lived with my parents, there were no photos linked and the most identifying information listed was my age. There was a summary section with names of people who live around my parents, but they were almost five years old and represent easily attainable public record. The part I found most humorous and disingenuous was an “Approximate Reputation Score” which you can only investigate if you start handing over your credit card digits.

I experienced slim pickings with Bing, so I was curious to see if the trend would continue with Google.

We Say, "Google It" For a Reason

The all-knowing Alphabet Inc. gave me some more personal results, possibly revealing the first crack through my digital armor. The only result for “Nico Figueroa” that I came across through this entire endeavor was on page 2 of the Google search page, where my GitHub profile and history shows up. I wasn’t too impressed by this because my username is uniquely @NicoFigueroa, and after all, the site is a place to host Open-Source software. It stands to reason that my public repositories are on display for the world to see. No problems there, I don’t mind sharing my “professional” work with the world.

Two more listings I felt merited mentioning, the first of which is a link to a Washtenaw Community College list of Honors Students from 2020 which nobody had bothered to invite me to. The second is another tennis website which broadcasts my losing record during my time in Rec&Ed tennis career. Again, there is a clear distinction to me between finding a picture of myself from a private profile and these news articles or school events. So far, I would like to report that I am satisfied with the results of my effort to remain as anonymous as possible.

The Empire Strikes Back

After typing in every combination of my name along with personal details I could think of, the only information that named me personally are “People Search” websites, which promise intimate details about the person in question. I investigated the site truthfinder.com as carefully as possible to find where they are getting this information and what my rights are to remove it.

A screenshot from truthfinder.com after trying to sneak a peak at my personal report

That site cites its sources as government records with offerings such as: “Criminal and arrest records” or “Social media profiles”. The list continues to mention they scrape deep web information and social media data in order to build an accurate profile of every person in the United States.

The scariest part about these sites I stumbled upon is the inclusion of my family members and their last known addresses are listed right next to mine. I’m glad that there is very bare bones information procurable about any of them, but it is still very unsettling to me to know that it is so easy to find out the connections to people I care about through what the government deems acceptable to release publicly. Although I’m uncomfortable with a certain brand of website that I appear on, I must admit that there is far less information available through Google and Bing than I expected to find. I am comfortable with the level of exposure that I appear at, at least with medium effort searching.

How Did I Do?

The intriguing facet of my digital profile is whether my lack of public information has truly affected my real life in the way that I hope. I was very happy to find that I had a difficult time uncovering any dirty laundry about myself, aside from records which could be physically attained as well through City Hall.

To answer my own question from the beginning of this journey, I would say that my data identity does reflect my digital intentions. The second part is the convoluted answer, where I cannot say with definite certainty that this change, I am trying to make has resulted in bettering myself and the people around me. The strongest quality that I have noticed improving in myself since giving up social media is how much more I try and understand other people's point of view. Online it can be so difficult to see people as people, but I am really trying my best to be open minded every day.