For most of us, everyday we encounter the world wide web, we pay bills, check our email, read the news, and maybe search for information. Others who use it even more have various accounts with online sites and publish pictures and papers and video to the web on a regular basis.
As a class assignment, I was asked to attempt a vanity search. An online search on myself that is. The idea seemed interesting and definitely struck my curiosity cord, but the fear of what I would find had me anxious to complete it!
Just before leaving that class, my professor was able to do a quick vanity search on himself and pull up not only his blog web page but public records showing his full name, age, city and even a couple relatives! For myself, not really knowing what someone could do with this information doesn't suit me so I'd just rather them not have it. That being said, as I sat down to do my own vanity search my fingers were crossed! But sure enough, all my info... name, age, city, mom and dad, high school.... I was so bummed!
I continued searching various databases, google, yahoo, etc., and though I didn't find a ton on my name, probably because I'm young, a search of my overused email prefix, which I've used as a user name for many accounts, came up with more info on me! What annoyed me most was that most of the searches, all but one, were from accounts that I'd opened myself and then never used.... like reunion.com and classmatefinder.com, blah!! I quickly deleted the accounts, trying to rid the web of my personal info!
On a better note, now a days, while I can't keep my info completely off of the web, I've learned some ways of limiting it. I never input a real name into accounts I have online and in general, I limit the concrete stuff I put on the web voluntarily. Even this blog, for instance, has little of me besides a picture and my email address.
So, how much is too much, what can be done with what is there, what rights DO I have and what rights do I NOT have? I don't know the answers to these questions yet, but I'm sure as heck gonna find out!
5 comments:
Nice steps to securing and limiting your online presence. Only problem I see? You just blogged all your personal info here and re-linked it to the 'Net. In fact, you probably gave them (those tiny little computer gophers at Google) more identifying information just in this post (real name, age, city, relatives, email address)
GAH! It gets you no matter what you do. (Since you were deleting other stuff, maybe re-do this post?)
:)
Hey hon, i totally am going to agree with Scott about the fact that you have posted a lot of info about yourself. you have even told us who your parents are and what user name you often use. Not too safe. =( and it is crazy that there can be so much stuff about us on the internet that we don't even think about.
I didn't think of searching by user names and email addresses I have used in the past. I'm going to have to try that later today. Scott1223 raises some good questions. Now when you google yourself does this bog show up? I don't have any pictures or information that identifies me (I don't think) and I am starting to think that I want to keep it that way...
Problem fixed :-)
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