After searching myself under various search criteria, I found an abundance of disclosed personal information, that, to be honest, hit a little too close for comfort.
First, I searched my name on google, which brought up my facebook, twitter, linkedin, and pinterest profiles as the top results. I also found many articles back from high school that highlighted my academic and athletic performances.
After that, I looked up my phone number on the whitepages website, and I was brought to a nearby town and the store that provides my cellular service. The website had the ability to further search into my hometown address, other users on the plan, and various other facts.
The factfinder gave me median incomes, total number of housing units, median household sizes, etc.
The AccessDane website provided the information about my local address here in Madison. It showed the property value, the housing value, the total lot value, the owner of the property, and information on school districts.
The New York Times website provided me with information about my hometown. I found that the most common income bracket fell between 100,000-120,000. The racial demographics turned out to be 73% white, 8% black, 12% hispanics, 5% asians, and 2% other. This did not surprise me, as it was evident in my schools that this was a reality. There are 95% high school graduates, 42% bachelor's degrees, and 14% masters present in my hometown. It's evident that I grew up in a typical middle-class predominantly white suburb of Chicago.
The social media search was interesting. Since my name is relatively unique (the spelling) it was clearly pointed to me, or a different "Raechel" who shared that spelling for their first name. I was brought to multiple photos, posts, and tweets that had high trafficked responses in the past. I think that it would be easy to remain annonymous on social media searches because since my computer (used for the searching) knows me and my history, it would be harder to find me if I were using a public computer. You would really need to utilize the other information searched for in this assignment to really find me on a social media site. I think I would be easier to find though, because my name's spelling is more unique.
After doing this assignment, the reality that the internet knows everything we post and never forgets is quite apparent. I now realize how much caution is necessary when posting things to the internet. Once there, always there. Or, so it seems.
No comments:
Post a Comment