Travis Spuller
My life revolves around the internet. Like many young adults these days, I have grown up interconnected with friends and strangers online. My career, entertainment, and studies involve around this interconnected infosphere. To be clear, I’m not hiding, or even think about my privacy. Therefore, it’s strange to see that I’m an enigma to data collectors.
I’ve never felt the need to withhold details about myself. The internet should be approached like any other public space. Any information that is voluntarily given should be considered information you’re willing to share with the public. To illustrate how overt I am with my data online, I should note that all my social media is open to the public. My Instagram profile is public and a lot of my Facebook information (posts, the university attend, my places of employment, and images) can be seen without the need of my approval (a friend request). Yet, I was able to escape data brokers.
Data Brokers
The data brokers need a unique identifier to help congregate data. Usually it is a name, but email appears to be an important contributor. According to my report, they were using an old email that I use to have as my primary email before high school, however, it is mostly used for spam. Now, I have twelve active emails that I use. Either they be student emails, work emails, or personal emails, they all have a purpose and are spread around different parts of the infosphere.
Have these emails served as a sort of cloaking device? Well, it may appear so since the data brokers didn’t seem to list these other emails. They also only referenced my social media accounts (Amazon, Google, and Facebook) which all use this old email. Hence, by getting their hands on these other emails, they would definitely see a lot more data about me (especially if they had my LinkedIn email).
Along with the previous mentioned information, BeenVerified, the data broker in question, also had my correct address (both my mother’s and father’s even though they didn’t list them as my relatives) and my phone number. These things are public record, so it’s not very surprising to see them listed here. By this lack of information, I will claim that I am an anonymous user that shares publicly and will reflect on this in the following section. I will not argue how data brokers misrepresent me by having too little information about me, but instead focus on how I am misrepresented on search engines
My Online Identity
For both my previous blog posts, I have questioned self-identity and how online identities can’t represent one’s self-identity. There is so much that goes into an identity that isn’t represented online. However, the information used for my online identity is quite accurate. Tagging allows pictures to be tied to my name and display what activities I engage in. For example, I found a lot hits relevant to Track and Field because that’s what I did. By having my name in online articles about the High School team or by displaying the stats of a competition, my identity can now be linked with the sport. However, it may be too much.
Since Track and Field is a very statistical sport, every competition I've ran in is published online. Therefore, by searching my name in a search engine, most of the results relate to Track. Some may see it as a positive, as it creates a persona that I’m physical fit and athletic, but it clearly isn’t me. If I were to describe myself, it would take a few hours for me to even bring up Track and Field. My online profile should mention my two years playing volleyball or that I golf (albeit for leisure) as they are more recent activities I've engaged in.
There are certain imbalances in how I’m represented (too much track and field) and mentions very little about other aspects of my life. There are several arguments that could be made here in response. One: the online identity exposes an individual of who they really are because they are more timid in person. Two: an online identity has become an idealized version of the self-identity. Three: the online identity is a misrepresentation of one’s self.
The reason the first response fails is because it doesn’t acknowledge that people can be more reluctant to expose themselves online. Also, a lot of identities are inauthentic in order to appear perfect. That leads to the second response. We can think that social media is a great way to become a more idealized version of ourselves, but we must consider other sources that contribute to our identity. For example, the schools that record my race time is unbiased and can present times that aren’t satisfactory to me. Hence, I will further discuss the third response, and how my online identity is authentic.
In order to claim that my online identity is authentic of my self-identity, I will first define my self-identity. Already, you should know that this is nearly impossible. If I were able to simply describe to you who I am within a few sentences, that’d be a miracle. Instead, my identity will be based on my perception of others, since my own reflection of who I am can be skewed by my desires. Therefore, my identity will be based on actions, statements, and physical attributes because these can be perceived. Shoemaker states that “the self is implicated in action” though he goes on to discuss that there is more that contributes to the self. Yet, action is a part of one’s self and I will focus solely on this part.
One (of many) issues with my online identity is its temporality and relevance. There are two items that are of my self-identity, Boy Scouts and Track, that present an issue with relevancy. These two activities are some of the first things that appear in my search which have been long over in my life. Past activities and actions do contribute to one’s self-identity, but should make a very small portion of it, depending how much time has passed. For example, I attended preschool, that is something that makes up who I am, but it should not be thought of that I am a preschooler or I am currently attending preschool. Instead, the activity should only be a fact of one’s self and shouldn’t carry any weight on their current self-identity. This issue with ‘attachment’ is brought up in Floridi’s chapter on Privacy in The Fourth Revolution. Our data serves as an ethical issue because it “mummifies your personal identity” and can prevent an individual to be able to renew ourselves. As the information friction decreases, it allows for labels to become more difficult to detach from (Floridi).
This idea implies to what is represented in my online identity. There is more weight given to these two items (Boy Scouts and Tracks) than to more relevant activities in my life. Either I need to update my social media, or search engines search for items with more frequency. I know it is the former because search engines tend to sort and prioritize by most recent hits. Therefore, I must consider if I’m serving an injustice when I don’t update myself online. It is the reason why some of my identity is unauthentic.
Another reason my identity is unauthentic is because of other parties who are contributing to my online identity by means of tagging or mention. Perhaps this is an area in which needs reconsideration. By allowing your name to be attached to other posts and articles, you lose the control of what information is public or not. This idea aligns with the ideas of two theories of information privacy: control theory and the Restricted Access/Limited Control Theory (RALC) described in David Shoemaker’s paper, Self-exposure of the self: informational privacy and the presentation of identity. Tagging denies people access to control the presentation of information about oneself.
I found that limiting the time frame of a Google search to information from the last year, results in a better representation of myself. It lists my current employer and information about the college I transferred from (yet nothing on my enrollment in the University of Michigan). This allowed old labels to be invisible in the results. Even though I’m complacent with my findings, I still find that data brokers, and the data aggregated in search engines, should be reconsidered because they void one’s right to represent themselves and control their own information.
References
Shoemaker, David. “Self-exposure and exposure of the self: informational privacy and the presentation of identity”. Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009.
Floridi, Luciano. The 4th Revolution: How the Infosphere Is Reshaping Human Reality. Oxford University Press, 2016.
