Nathan Gillispie
03/26/20
Searched
Living in 2020, it seems like you can find almost everything on the internet. There are blogs, forums, articles, videos, pictures, files, and services that flood the internet with trillions of bytes of data every day. Everything has become so accessible and convenient from one small little white search bar. It begs the question, “Is everything really on the internet?”. Today, I decided to see what information I could access about myself on a public computer in the Christopher Newport Library. I signed out of all my google accounts and scholarly sites and used two search engines (Google & Bing) to gather as much information as I could on the identity of Nathan Gillispie.
I opened Google first and searched for “Nathan Gillispie” under the general search bar. Roughly 500,000 results returned and I started to sift through the links to see what I could find. The first result from my self-search was a link to Facebook.com, however, this link was not for my personal account. Results that were brought back on Google were hundreds of other Nathan Gillispies from around the world. The following links were Instagram, VCU.edu directory, and LinkedIn accounts. I was shockingly unable to find any solidified information about myself through Google's searched links. It seemed like the privacy features that I use on my social media accounts were working. I clicked on the LinkedIn link and it brought me to four references of Nathan Gillispie where I could locate my profile however, it was not accessible from the public domain.
After scrolling through three pages on Googles search tab, I switched to Google images to see if I could find anything relevant there. I stumbled across an old photo I uploaded on Facebook years ago. The photo was not of myself yet I was shocked to see the internet retain that specific piece of information. I then found a photo of my now deceased grandfather on the first page of searches. The link brought me to his obituary page from Farmville, Virginia but had no further information on him.
I continued to scroll through Google images and found a group photo, which I was in, that I had never posted. The photo was a professional shot of my fraternity brothers on bid-day at CNU. The link took me to the fraternity website where my name was listed under “newly initiated members 2017”.
I found it interesting that even if I had posed nothing online I would eventually find things that others had posted about me. I scrolled to page three of the search results where nothing else was found that related to myself. So far, I was beginning to think I was well hidden online.
Next, I used the Bing search engine to find information on myself. These results were even more depressing than Google’s. I found lots of different Nathan’s who were tax managers, doctors, and professors but nothing on myself. It became a bit disappointing not seeing any recognition at all online as I tried scrolling to page 5 of the results. I switched to Bing images and videos where I found nothing that remotely resembled myself nor the content I engage with. I started to feel like I was flying under the radar compared to a lot of these other Nathan Gillispie that flooded the images page. Upon my search in Bing, I stumbled across a “Whitepages” link that took me to a database website that collects people's identity.
There I found an accurate representation of my identity that provided my mother and father's names along with the city and state I currently live in. I clicked on the profile that then brought up my age and an access link that required payment for premium information. I was a bit scared seeing that online and was curious to know what the premium information entailed. I scrolled further and found that the benefits of paying were access to their phone number (if on record), addresses, and criminal/public records. I personally found this to be very alarming and imagined how many other people were represented on this “Whitepages” database. I started searching for my friend's names and sure enough, I found their information as well. Finding this was scary at first but realized that not too many people would pay a premium price of $30.00 just for some basic information on myself. People would be better off just finding my social media accounts and accessing that information for free. Besides my findings on Whitepages.com, Bing proved to be an even more lackluster search than Google.
Once I concluded my general searches between Bing and Google, I began to get more aggressive with my search terms. I implemented additional information such as my middle name and user account names. This is when my personal information started to seep through the cracks of the internet's massive online database. I was accurately able to locate my Facebook account on Google and Bing from the first results page. The information from Facebook was very limited due to the privacy policies I have implemented on my account. I seemed to just display the information I was comfortable giving to the public. This included my profile picture and name (of course), my cover picture, residents, birth, and occupation. It also showed the total number of friends I had with three additional photos that I posted on my timeline. I was satisfied with the amount of visible information that was displayed toward the public and thought it was an appropriate amount of limited information that strangers could gather on my identity. Next was my Instagram profile which I had to be even more aggressive with in order to find. I found the basic Instagram themed page where it displayed my total posts, follower count, following count, profile picture, name, and bio. This is exactly what I would expect from the information I could gather off Instagram, as this is the same page you would see if you searched for someone who has their account on “private”. Lastly, I searched for my Twitter account that was made for this course and, as expected, could find the account with public access to all my tweets and information that I had shared with the platform.
Concluding my investigative search on the identity of Nathan Gillispie, I have returned with minimal and anticlimactic results. I was not able to find any revealing information about myself (besides the Whitepages) that would make me second guess my online activity. Although I was unsatisfied with my results from my online search, I was content with the final outcome. I take advantage of the privacy features on social media platforms and they are obviously paying off. Despite my digital footprint being very minimal online, I am most definitely aware of how easily and accessible my information could be without proper privacy options. As mentioned in the article on Revenge Porn, the theory of privacy has an increased attention to the user's ability to limit information about oneself on the internet (Stroud & Henson, 2016). Having effective privacy options for social media platforms may help to limit the amount of information that is accessible to the public. Privacy options act as a valuable safety net from personal content to be leaked to the public through the endless amount of online forums and blogs.
Stroud, Scott and Henson, Jonathan, Social Media, Online Sharing, and the Ethical Complexity of Consent in Revenge Porn (September 25, 2016). Scott R. Stroud & Jonathan A. Henson, "Social Media, Online Sharing, and the Ethical Complexity of Consent in Revenge Porn," Online Consumer Behavior: The Dark Side of Social Media, Angeline Close Scheinbaum (ed.), Routledge, 2017 Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2843232
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