Although there was a lot of information about me available on the internet, all of it was information that I elected to make visible on the web. Doing more general searches about my ZIP code and address revealed nothing personal; only information about the owners of my apartment building and census statistics about the 11 thousand people living in West Madison. The only front page Google result that wasn't about me was about someone named Ashleigh Carolyn Nave, the daughter of an astrophysicist at Georgia State who had apparently included her name in his web bio. If we were to hypothesize about the most likely demographic to live in my ZIP code based on census data, it would be that of a 25-34 year old caucasian with at least a high school degree and a median income of something around $70,000/year.
The thing that strikes me most about what I was able to find is that it's all very much about the availability of information. The easiest data I could find on myself belonged not to me but to the companies that owned that information about me (Facebook, Twitter, AT&T, etc.).
2 comments:
Your last sentence is really thought provoking such that if your information is owned by others then do you have any claim to how they use your information, who they share the information with? Can you be upset if the information is shared with parties that you don't want it to be shared with? Or is there an unspoken, assumed agreement that the company will not share this information with anyone?
I found the same thing to be true about the social networks, I find it interesting that those more personal aspects are the easiest to find on the web
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