Online Me-Kathryn Allen

Searching for information about the area I grew up in, my parents' home phone number, my cell phone number, and my address at university produced varying results. The information search relating to my home town or my parents produced information about the average person that lives in my township, a white, high-school educated person around 37 making about $56,000 a year that lives in an extremely homogenous community. This is extremely different from the information gathered about my address in Madison where the demographics are slightly different-white, university student/young professional around 24 making about $27,000, but living in apartments that are subsidized by loans either from banks or parents.

Googling for my name either <first name last name> or <last name, first name> produced results about other women with the same name or some spelling variation of it. They were lawyers, doctors, and fashion designers. This was the same for other sites I searched. Search results did not start to link to pages with my information until more identifying phrases were added to the search such as "madison, wi," <my Wisc e-mail>, or other identifying key phrases, the results were still mixed with other women with the same information searched for. Pages that were linked were my LinkedIn page, my social media pages, and various clubs I am a member of. This paired with the results about my hometown describes a young female who grew up in a small, farming community and is currently a college student interested in mathematics, international affairs, and traveling. The demographics information about my hometown does not accurately describe who I am, the information about my cell phone number only relates to where I got the cell phone number, not my current location, and the information gathered from more specific searches in Google or Facebook about me only represent a part of who I am, the part that I have decided to share with the world. There is a lot that cannot be expressed on the internet, or that I wish to remain private. I would rather there be less information about me on the internet and easily assessable. Unfortunately, to be competitive in the job market today, or to be social, I need to have several social media accounts to be kept informed, to socialize, to keep in touch with friends all around the world, and to network. Fortunately with the EU Court's ruling within the last year in regards to the right to be forgotten, maybe one day a person in the US could be removed from search engines' results, allowing someone to gain some privacy back that has been taken away, at least eroded by new technologies.