Personal Research Paper

Originally created by Scott Duke. 

This week’s blog post intrigued me. As a 25 year old, I was always told through high school and college that anything I put on the Internet was out there for everyone to see. The amount of times this phrase was repeated was endless, and I like to think I did a pretty good job of keeping my “digital footprint” safe. However, this project made me realize that my “digital tattoo” may be a little different. This is the information that is out there that maybe I wasn’t compiling or I wasn’t putting onto the web myself. This was information compiled through other databases, some that I had no idea of.

I don’t think I was scared about this project, because I understand the reality of our digital world, but I was curious to see how much I could find. I started with my most common search engine, Google, and then moved on to others such as PeekYou, Pipl, Radaris, Nuwber,  Spezify, BlockShopper, Social Mention, and People Finders. I know it said we had to use a minimum of seven resources, but I was so carried away and having fun that I think I tried them all. The ones listed above gave me the most information about myself.

First off, there were tons of pictures popping up. Old social media profile pictures, current social media profile pictures, a photo of me that I’m using on my professional website for this class, and even a picture of the yearbook page from my high school. I also found it interesting that when I Google image searched myself, a lot of pictures that popped up were not me, but people I worked with. I’m assuming this is because we share an online directory for our school and all of our photos are listed by our contact information. I was also associated with some of the pictures of our students doing activities around school  (raking leaves, grilling food, etc) that have been posted on the school’s website. See my screen shot below of some of the images that popped up!

Personal screenshot taken during my data mining. 

Other information that I came across was my address, age, and both my cell and home phone numbers. Nuwber even gave me a list of neighbors that lived near me. I glanced over the names and many of them I knew, but a few stuck out that I did not recognize. Why someone would need to associate me to my neighbors is interesting to me, especially because we have such a variety of age range.

Most of my family was listed as relatives on almost every site. I also saw that not only was it my parents and siblings, but my grandma’s name was always included as well. My grandma lived with us for many years so I’m assuming that is how they clumped her in with us. I was intrigued to see that my dad’s brother, his son, his son’s wife, and their children popped up a few times as “relatives.” This is interesting because my dad is one of ten and there are a ton of people who share our last name, so why they were the only ones to be associated I’m not sure. It may be that the live in a closer radius to us than the others?

My last fun fact that I came across through my data mining was that PeekYou actually listed a hobby for me as running. This took my back a bit. Yes, I enjoy running, but how would anyone know that?  I’m not even sure I would consider that my #1 hobby. Luckily, I ended my searching with another try at Google and exploring other pages. This lead me find that later on in my Google pages, there were a few articles of meets or results from cross country meets I participated in during high school, I can only assume this is where someone made up my running hobby!

Overall, this was a fun project and it was interesting to see the information that came across while researching myself!