What's Your Digital Tattoo?

I have a love/hate relationship with the screen time feature on my smart phone.  It tells me how many hours and minutes I've been on my phone this week, it compares how I am doing this week from last week, and it gives me a breakdown of where most of that time is spent.  During my hours of time spent in the online world, which is now even easier than before due to smart phones, I am I leaving behind a trail of all my activities, all my posts, likes, comments, and potentially even personal information for all to see.  But what exactly can others see about me?

Data Mine

I conducted a data mine of myself to figure out how easy or difficult it was to find me (and where) as well as what type of information there is about me online.  

First off, my name turns out to be a very common name.  Searches for my name,  name + middle initial on Google surrounded by quotation marks did not produce any searches attached to my name at least within the first 5 pages provided by Google out of the 75,700 results.  From there I decided to add another data point and began to do searches with my personal email address.  The top hit from that search was a link to my instagram page, however, since my account is marked private I wouldn't be able to go further unless I was signed in and provided access to my page.  I also went to social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and if provided just my name, even with my middle initial, it was pretty difficult to find me.  I then went to Youtube.com and searched for my name, and I was pretty shocked to find myself out of 3 others listed, due to a video I posted for a graduate school course.  

I also went to websites like instantecheckmate.com, truthfinder.com, peekyou.com, and whitepages.com and with a little bit more digging, I was able to find myself on those websites.  The difference with these sites is that it did require me to provide additional data points to track myself down.  They asked for follow up questions about age, prior felonies, spouses' names, and cities I've lived in, and even with that information, there were still over 100+ possible matches.  I also went to whitepages.com and eventually found myself out of 33 hits, with my full home address listed in plain view for all to see.

Finally, I pulled up two recent photos of myself and attempted to use the google image search feature to see if there were any other similarly faced images of myself floating around in the Google Search ride.  There were no matches.

Thoughts

Overall, I was very pleased at the results of my data mine because I was hard to find.  Due to having a very common name, it would require somebody to have additional information about me to help them in their search.  Granted, I know that some of those details are out there (i.e. my current address on whitespages.com) I enjoy the fact that it is somewhat more difficult for somebody to track me down.  I also know that I am very conscious about my privacy settings on my social media accounts (not made public) and to my best ability, I don't have my birthday, hometown, high school information and other possible security question answers listed anywhere on my social media accounts.  My true friends can still wish me a happy birthday without a reminder from Facebook.  =)

With all this being said, it takes a lot of effort to maintain your online presence and one decision to post or share something can like a tattoo, be really really hard to remove.  It does take a conscious effort to do this, and it requires one to know about it.  I believe it should be a concerted effort from parents and teachers to help educate and remind students of the ramifications of their online presence.  Given the exposure of technology and the ease and availability of going online, students as young as in kindergarten should have age appropriate lessons geared towards being safe online.

via GIPHY