Nicolas Figueroa
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 experience outside of the internet?
Contents
They Call Me Nico
I think my name is the best place to start. A unique nickname is a fantastic segue into what could be an enthralling conversation with a new person, and Nico is the best nickname I could have asked for. I love telling people that, no it isn’t my real name, along with explaining how I’m not from somewhere cool, just my dad is. My names are 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.
Just to expand on my personal details here, in order to better critique my findings through search engines, I want to include some defining 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, mostly 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 each search engine I simply started with “Nico Figueroa” and then built up the entry to include more intimate details in the hopes of uncovering some 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 UofM, 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 confirm that I might be famous without knowing it. These results align well with the amount I feel comfortable being represented online and although the blog post I wrote reveals some details about my workplace, I believe it is not personal as well as being important for a company to be transparent with its community.
False Positive
The one result that scared me a little bit was something I have never encountered before online. A search engine listing for mylife.com, which described exactly my age, an address and the names of all my immediate family! I will absolutely admit to being anxious to click the link, but we all know that the story comes first.
I felt distinctly relieved when the page loaded, showing only publicly available government record information. The address posted is the one on my driver's license from when I still lived with my parents, there are no photos linked and the most identifying information listed is my age. There is a summary section with names of people who live around my parents, but they are almost five years old and represent public government information such as property titles. The part I found most humorous is an “Approximate Reputation Score” which you can only investigate if you start handing over your credit card digits.
Phew. I was hard pressed to find anything meaningful through Bing, so I was curious to see discover any correlation 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 saw 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 problem there, I don’t mind sharing my “professional” work with the world.
Two more listings I felt merited a passing mention, the first of which is a link to a Washtenaw Community College list of Honors Students from 2020 which I had never been made aware of. 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.
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.
