The first thing I noticed about the “self-search” was that
my address was linked to someone else. The funny part about this is that the
person who it is linked to is my twin cousin from Connecticut. I’m not really
sure how Whitepages could have associated her with my address when my parents’
names come up when you click it, but there it is. What also was a little bit
weird about the Whitepages search was that when I clicked both my parents’
names, their ages came up. Again, Whitepages must have pulled information from
mail or something to obtain that data. I didn’t, however, find any information
associated to my name. Next, I continued the self search by looking myself up
on Facebook. Since my privacy settings, or so I think, are set to ultra
private, you can’t look me up on Facebook people search. Still with nothing, I
typed my name on Google and the first link that came up was to
highschoolsports.nj.com where it listed my high school field hockey statistics
for the duration of my varsity career. The next link led me to my blogspot
where I introduced myself to my fellow peers in the LIS class. The other link I
found interesting that it listed were my results for a 5-mile race I ran when I
was 12 years old. Looking back on the statistics were really cool and I’m still
impressed that I ran 5 miles in 39 minutes as a 12 year old.
Unfortunately, much didn’t come up for my name in particular
on the search engine because I’m more careful with what I post with my real name
and what I associate with. However, as I said before, it was really cool to see
the race and field hockey statistics and someone looking me up on the computer
would probably see that I love sports and am pretty athletic. In terms of this being a "fair"representation of who I am, of course it's not. It all depends on the type of information and the information you as a user want to share on the online database and I don't feel comfortable enough displaying that knowledge to the anonymous public.
1 comment:
It looks like we had fairly similar search experiences. Although, I don't have a twin cousin that lives in CT. However, I also couldn't find much information about myself on Facebook. Your comment about Facebook's privacy settings was pretty funny and also relatable because it seems like FB changes it every other week. Have you ever used Google Maps to search for the street view of your house? I think it is more telling than the White Pages site. Interesting post. See you in class.
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