This weekend I took the opportunity
to explore what an stranger could find out about myself on the internet knowing
various things about me. One of the first interesting things I found while
searching my area, is that living only a couple miles from downtown Chicago
truly makes it hard to distinguish what type of person I am from a person who
would live a couple miles away. The
population of Cook County is over 5 million people, and pretty racially diverse,
there is a small chance of distinguishing what type of person I am. While if
someone only had access to my zip code, they would be able to successfully
deduct my ethnicity.
Knowing my
full name and searching it on Google wasn’t as horrifying as I expected it to
be. One of the first links that comes up indicates there are five people named
Nicole Hulick in the United States, however their locations are states I don’t
live in. On Facebook you don’t have access to anything on my page, and you can
see there are other Nicole Hulick profile pictures while mine is blocked.
However, searching Google images on Nicole Hulick leads to numerous Facebook
profile pictures of mine, but also numerous pictures of my mother, which is not
only strange, but also semi disturbing. Knowing there are specific algorithms
to Google makes me wonder if searching from a Wisconsin computer would lead to
my page due to my location in Wisconsin, than through me that would connect to
my mothers page, or it connects to her page just from the last name.
Knowing this is the representation
of my existence is in a way pretty frustrating; no interesting pages come up,
there isn’t anything about my education or any work or volunteering I’ve done.
However, it is reassuring to know that searching for me, you must know my
address, my name, and my age in order to figure out- yet still unreliably-which
pictures are of me, and that I have successfully privatized my images and
videos on the internet where a person of basic computing skills wouldn’t have
the access to them.
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