Difference between revisions of "Talk:Nikita Badhwar"

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As technology continues to advance, finding information about someone is actually pretty easy. All you really need is a first and last name, and some basic information about them—the school they attend, a hometown, or even an age. Place this simple, harmless information into the Google search bar and in less than a second, you get thousands of results to look through. Although many of the results will be useless, the chances that you find some information are very high.  If a simple google search doesn’t provide you with the information you require, a simple subscription to various data-brokers can give you lots of information including a person’s address, information on their family, and even criminal records.
 
     
 
When using social media, I rarely think about the consequences. Most applications track some kind of information on you in the background. Netflix, for example, uses your watch history in order to suggest new shows and movies to you. More than this, however, using applications like Facebook or Pinterest, publically paints a picture about who you are as a person—creating an online identity for you. Simply by creating a Facebook account, and listing my hometown, a simple search of my name reveals personal information about me that is very easy to access.
 
As I began the search to find my online identity and what it revealed about me I learned one thing: my online identity is rather insignificant.
 
  
Finding myself online:
 
 
When beginning to search myself, I tried to do so as someone that had no knowledge about me, except for my name. Out of the top 10 results, only 3 were actually related to me. Out of these three, one was my Facebook profile, one was my Pinterest account and the last was not even of me, but was a profile of my father with information on his business.
 
I then took it a step further and added my age and hometown, nothing changed out of my top results expect for a couple of high school articles I was mentioned in and the order in which results of me appeared. 
 
 
At first glance, these links don’t offer up a ton of information. After clicking through each one, you find where I attend college, my birthday, my hometown, and looking through my pinterest shows you a couple things I was interested years ago when I actively used the account. You can see four of my pictures on Facebook, without being my friend, and the only posts I have on my “timeline” are pictures I am tagged in or the occasional “Happy Birthday” post. Taking it a step further, the profile that Instant Check Mate created for me, shows my address, the dates I was seen there, my family member’s names and contains information on the people that live around me.
 
 
Viewing information about me from the perspective of someone who isn’t friends with me on social media only allows you to see the most basic information about me. Nothing I found came as a shock to me. Based off of my profiles, I am a 21-year-old college student who has her accounts set to private with very minimal information about who I actually am available. This information on me doesn’t give a lot of insight into my personality of my beliefs aside from that fact that I value privacy.
 
 
Despite the lack of public information on my profiles, the pictures I do share do tell a lot about me. Scrolling through my facebook timeline, you can see that I travel, and spend a lot of time with family. You might also see pictures from club-events, and if you search through the groups I am apart of you can find that I study Computer Science, and that my culture is something that is very important to me.
 
 
Creating my online identity:
 
 
I joined social media accounts like facebook and pinterest around the same time most of my friends did in high school. At the time, I posted pictures with my friends, allowed myself to be tagged in posts, and updated my profile from time to time. Most of my use with facebook, however, cannot be seen today.  In high school, I didn’t really care what my friends and peers saw on my facebook, and didn’t really care how it would affect people’s perceptions of me. After graduating highschool, I decided I didn’t want people I would meet to be able to make assumptions about me based off of my facebook. I deleted most of my embarrassing pictures, removed myself from tags, and began screening what people saw when clicking on my profile. To this day, I remove myself from any pictures I am tagged in, and limit my use of Facebook- only viewing things and occasionally liking others’ posts instead of creating my own.
 
 
Although I had nothing to hide, just posts about who I went to the movies with that week or a picture from a birthday party I attended, I decided I didn’t want to be represented through my social media. After deleting my old posts, I realized I didn’t care enough to post new things, and it changed the way I used social media altogether. This realization came long before I ever considered the consequences of social media.
 
 
Despite deleting many posts from earlier years on social media, many things still remain present that reveal a lot about who I am. In “Identity-Onlife” Floridi states that “social media also represent an unprecedented opportunity to be more in charge of our social selves, to choose more flexibly who the other people are whose thoughts and interactions create our social personality indirectly to determine our personal identities”.  With the option to choose what I post and share to my friends on facebook I can, to some extent, control my “social self”.
 
 
Conclusion:
 
 
Through researching myself, and my usage of social media I have learned that my profile doesn’t tell you a lot about who I am. This is not a surprise due to my lack of social media usage. Although I try not to share too much online, there are some things about me that I cannot hide. The places I live, places I’ve gone, who I interact with are all things that are readily available. The use of social media, even when you control your usage, creates an online identity about you.
 

Revision as of 18:31, 20 February 2019