Vanity Search

Who are we on the web? What is our digital footprint? I use the search engine of Google daily; however, I had never googled myself! My first assignment from the course of Web 2.0 asked us to perform a vanity search and see what we would retrieve, what was our digital footprint! Let me tell you; I was quite surprised.

I got started by including quotation marks around my first and last name on the google search bar. The first listing was the e-portfolio that I have been using throughout my graduate coursework, so I thought ok, no biggie. The next listing was my blog page that I also use for educational purposes. I also came across the popular YouTube, I have been recently uploading videos for my students to be able to watch during our distance learning time, so this did not surprise me much. However, the next set of links was websites that had my personal information. It included names I am associated with, my date of birth, the name of my spouse, our wedding date, my current phone numbers, my address, relatives, and included a list of cities where I have resided. This was alarming; all this information is public!

I performed an additional search with my maiden name. The first set of links was similar to the previous search of my personal information. But I also came across something I had no idea existed. I found a newspaper article dated back to February 11, 1993, and apparently, I was highlighted in this article. I went ahead and opened it and searched for my name; I was being recognized for being an Honor Roll student during the 3rd Six Weeks! Wow, I had no idea school districts would publish the list of their Honor Roll students in the local newspaper. This vanity search produced a rewarding feeling for me.

Lastly, I performed one last search using my nickname and maiden name together. In this search, I found various links, but none of them pertained to me. However, I went ahead and skimmed the images, and I found one of my personal kids when they were much younger. I went ahead and clicked on it, and it was my profile picture that I was using for my Pinterest account. This was worrisome for me. I’m not too fond of the idea that a picture of my kids is floating around on the web where anyone has access to it. This reaffirms how privacy is crucial when we are dealing with the worldwide network.

As I came to an end, I came to realize that my digital footprint is a bit conservative, none of my social media platforms popped out, which reassures the privacy options I have selected. I am not content on all the public information available for anyone to have access; however, I don’t think we have an option where we can deactivate or disable that shared setting.