EDTEC 527 - Initial Vanity Search

One of the first assignments in this course is to do a vanity search on my name to get an appreciation for my baseline digital footprint. As this course will have me doing a number of activities in the Web 2.0 space, this baseline will be compared to fresh vanity searches performed later in the course to track how my digital footprint evolves. Ideally this will not only give me insight into my digital footprint and how my actions impact how it changes, but it will also provide fodder for me to help my students understand the importance of considering their own digital footprints.

My first vanity search was a frightening experience - I managed to locate with little difficulty personal details about myself including all of my personal demographics, address, phone number, e-mail, social media accounts, education history, employment history, avocations, hobbies, charities, political affiliations, etc.. Further, my information quickly linked to those of my wife, my children, my grandchildren, my parents, my siblings, my coworkers, and my friends. The types of data accessible were expansive including profiles, data files, images, videos, and voice recordings. In addition, there is sufficient data that could be cross referenced to make reasonable approximations of my realtime location. Mind you this was a fairly simple vanity search based primarily on the Google search engine, not incorporating any paid searches or deep records searches which could easily be performed using the data collected. I know there are advantages to my presence on the internet, especially when I am trying to draw attention to something I wish to share, but it is shocking to delve into the unintended cost to my privacy.

A log of the vanity search is below.

Vanity Search Log

Note that the vanity search starts out very simply from my first and last name. A bit of narrowing by removing references including "Stephen" and "Robert" quickly yield a number of result relevant to me personally. Of course, to do this one needs to have some information about for whom they are looking, but knowing that I have a connection to Missouri and I am not an actor or a brain surgeon is enough. Narrowing down to a single person with my name is very simple given the multiple cross-references in each result of the initial search. After that, subsequent searches can easily be more finely targeted using the information gathered from the initial search results. Each result leads to other results that both confirm prior information and add to it. Even the pay search sites reveal useful additional information for free as teasers to get searchers to pay; since there are multiple pay-sites, there are multiple teasers that give additional information gratis when taken together. Finally, armed with the information from these searches, one can easily verify the existence of all kinds of social media sites which may reveal only snippets of information depending upon the user selected privacy settings, but present juicy opportunities for a less than scrupulous searcher to launch a fishing expedition targeting these site.

As I stated earlier, this was a frightening experience. My vanity search log is intentionally vague about the search results to avoid making gathering my personal data that much easier. I also must say that there were some results that identified relationships that surprised even me given the time that has past since last contact and the obscurity of the connections. Of course, this should not surprise me as the internet indiscriminately packs away bits of information in searchable formats with few expiration dates. Of course, withholding presentation of this data to the internet is nearly impossible while operating in our modern technology-based world, all the more so when presenting information that one wishes to be found by family, friends, peers, and students; this blog being an excellent example. Still, the inevitability of information discoverability should caution one to be very thoughtful and selective in what and how one shares on the internet.