Ponette Rubio

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet...” (Shakespeare)

Except that by any other more common name, My online identity would be quite different.

Hi my name is Ponette and I am the first and only Ponette at the University of Michigan as of 2021. So much so that my unique name is my first name, ponette.

I acknowledge how easy it is for someone to learn a lot about me if they even just take a second to look me up. Growing up, people often struggled to say my name, often commenting on how they had never met someone with my name. I wonder sometimes if I will ever meet someone else who shares my first name.

I have always been very guarded about my online identity, making sure that I think twice about what I post and keeping my social media private. Despite being quite easy to find, I like to think of myself as prepared. However, lately I have been thinking that perhaps even the most careful people might be more vulnerable online than we think.

Is my life an open book?

Search Query: Incognito

I started out by looking myself up by first and last name on Chrome Incognito mode. First I saw work related articles about me and as I scrolled through I found my social media handles as well as pictures from high school competitions. I clicked on the pictures tab and I noticed that almost all the pictures that came up were of me. I was a bit surprised because many of these pictures were also on my social media and LinkedIn page. I also saw tagged pictures of my friends as well.

Search Query: Regular Search

On the other hand, when I googled[[|..|right|... ]] my given birth name ‘Kavyapranati Pratapa’, I was able to find almost 5 pages of content that all had relevance to me! The top two search results were my Linkedin and WayUp profiles, but I also saw many more local newspaper articles about me from my spelling bee days within the first two pages. As I moved through the search results, I even found random blogs and discussion threads about the National Spelling Bee competitions that contained my name, with one user commenting how "with a name like Kavyapranati Pratapa, they can spell anything". What was most surprising, however, was finding a hashtag on Twitter of the very word that I misspelled in the 2012 National Spelling Bee!

Apart from [[|left|...]]'spelling bee' related results, there were a couple pages that contained my name from other activities, such as my vocal performances, my Medium blog that I don't post on anymore, the university's Honors Convocation last year, and even under another data broker service FastPeopleSearch.com. It was pretty shocking to see how many different sources of information contained my name. There was just too much out there.

Holes or Clues?

Although I am aware of the dangers of having my online identity compromised, I have never given much thought to how easily my information online could be accessed. As Luciano Floridi writes “It’s not that we don’t care about privacy, but that we accept that being online may be one of the less private things about our life”. More than anything, I was pretty surprised to see information about me from 8 or 10 years ago so easily accessible. These were aspects about my identity that I didn't know were out there for anyone to view.

While I realized that I had little control over whether I wanted to disclose such information or not, none of what I saw about myself was compromising my carefully-crafted online self. Therefore, I wasn’t incredibly concerned over my lack of informational privacy. It simply wasn't harmful to me.

Who gets to create online Ponette?

How much of my digital imprint serves the interests of others?

Likewise, as I looked through my data broker report, nothing seemed out of the ordinary or particularly harmful. The first couple pages were pulled from my Linkedin profile, though I did notice some inaccuracies in what was reported. For example, I wrote on my profile that I would be interning at Deloitte Consulting this summer, but also had my previous summer internship at [[|right||The First Page of my Instant checkmate Report]]Denison Consulting in Ann Arbor listed. When I looked at my report, however, the same company ‘Denison Consulting’ was listed for both my upcoming and my current internships.

Another discrepancy I noticed was in my education of the same ‘Linkedin section’. Prior to having been accepted to the business minor, I was a part of the Cappo Sales Track program through the Ross School of Business. Even though I have now updated my Linkedin profile to reflect my most current educational pursuits, my data broker profile depicted results from when I was still unsure of what my minor would be. As a result, this data is no longer accurate with what my educational pursuits are today.

Would the online Ponette approve of me?

Something that was interesting to see in my data broker profile were my previous areas of residence. I have done all of my schooling in the Ann Arbor - Ypsilanti area, but I've lived in Troy, Michigan and Dearborn, Michigan in the past. It was pretty intriguing to see the exact addresses of the places I lived in within these cities mentioned in my report. Until I saw this data, I didn't even know where I lived in these cities! At the same time, however, the fact that my residence information is accessible to anyone who utilizes a data broker service like Instant Checkmate was pretty shocking to me and made me realize how information that I always thought was 'private' was not private.

I was also concerned to see the large amount of sex offenders that lived in my area. Growing up, I knew that Ypsilanti wasn’t one of the safest areas to live in, but I never paid that much attention to my surroundings. While learning this information certainly hasn't changed my decision to leave Ypsilanti by any means, I am a little bit more aware of my surroundings and the demographics of the people that live in my general community. Lastly, echoing the phenomenon I observed when I googled myself, I noticed that only my Linkedin profile and email popped up under the social media category of the report. Though I was baffled at first, I eventually realized that neither my Facebook nor my Instagram accounts would be 'dug up' by the data broker since they both feature my abbreviated name ‘Kavya Pratapa’.

References

Google.com, Shakespeare