As I began to search myself on the recommended sites, I realized how easy it is for other people to look up information about me too. The White Pages knew exactly where my house was and everyone in my family, except for me. I found that weird because they had my sister on the page though. When I looked up my hometown on the New York Times map census, they had the population demographic spot on. It displayed exactly how Germantown, WI is in reality - a predominantly white suburb.
Getting away from where I live, the personal search wasn't as creepy than the first set of data. Once I began searching my name on Facebook, I couldn't find myself. I tried a couple different times, but unless I did something wrong, my privacy settings were actually doing what I want them to do. Looking up my name on google was a different story though. I found my picture from Twitter, Vine, and some from Instagram. No pictures from Facebook were in the search, which is why I believe my privacy settings were the cause of that. All in all, the lessons I've learned from doing searches like these are that if you don't want a professional seeing something on your social media's, then don't put it on there.
1 comment:
Hey Adam!
I totally agree with what you had to say. I found very similar results with my search. The websites that show population demographics and income distributions are really creepy. We are always told to monitor our social media accounts, but forget that there is broader information like education level and income that people can find about us. It's also weird that your whole family came up on Whitepages but you didn't. Overall, I agree that sometimes privacy settings can be complicated, and that we should just avoid putting information out there altogether if we don't want people to see it!
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