Blog 6

Cyber Stalking

 Before I began to cyber stalk myself, I was interested to see what I was going to find and I honestly did not have high expectations. I feel like nowadays you can find anyone online, but I try to do my best at keeping myself somewhat private. My only two public social media accounts are Twitter and LinkedIn so I knew going into this those would be easily accessible online. I prefer to keep my private life mostly private or at least have say over who is viewing what I am posting. I want to continue to keep my digital media footprint small because personal privacy is important to me.   

I started by using my personal laptop and logged out of everything so I could have a fresh start. Next, I simply typed out my name, “Lexi Brenner” into Google to see what popped up. What immediately caught my attention was my two different profile pictures. So I went to Google Images first to get a better look and after scrolling and scrolling through all the photos available I only saw two photos of myself, which was pretty surprising to me. One of the images, as you can see from the fine print underneath came from my LinkedIn profile picture and the photo beside it came from my Twitter profile, which happens to be the same profile picture for Instagram as well. 

As I continued to scroll through Google Images I noticed my grandfather’s picture, which happens to be the only man in the screenshot above. I was wondering how that got there, but once I clicked on the photo I realized it was from his online obituary from back in December and my name had been listed as a relative. As I continued down toward the bottom of page one, I recognized my great-grandmother, which you can see in the older woman in the photo below also taken from her obituary, again since I was listed as a relative. Since obituaries are available for the public to see, it makes since why they easily popped up with my name attached. I continued searching until I got to the “looks like you’ve reached the end” on Images and found no other pictures of myself so I feel like at least in terms of Google Images I am pretty secure.   

Then I went back to my original Google search to do some digging and saw that the first three links we other Lexi Brenner’s which was interesting to see since I thought my name was pretty unique, guess not. Then the fourth one was the link to my Instagram account, which I have always had as private. Even though it is not public it goes to a page where users can sign in online as shown in the image below. The only accessible information is my profile picture, number of posts, number of followers, how many I am following, and my biography with the link to my VSCO account.  

The next link down on Google was that of my account for Twitter. Since my profile on Twitter is currently public, Internet users have access to my whole account and can easily view everything I have tweeted, retweeted, and favorited, which is shown in the image below. As you can see everything is visible, the number of tweets, when I joined, followers and following. After this class, I will be moving my account back to private but for now I am only tweeting about social media so I feel there is no harm there.   

What I found interesting during my search was even though my LinkedIn profile picture appeared in Google Images, the first five pages on Google never showed a link to my LinkedIn account. I continued to search through the pages and did not have any luck finding any more information about me until page three. There was a link to White Pages, which I clicked on and it to me to the screen below. It shows my full name, my age, the area I live and users can pay to unlock the full report. This was scary to me, I was feeling good about my privacy until I found this. 

Next I decided to Google “Lexi Brenner Chesterfield, VA” which is where I live at home. As you can see in the image below, as I expected I saw my LinkedIn profile picture, beside it is a picture of my grandfather and then I am also in the top far right photo as a child and in the third picture over in the second row. However, when I went back to the “all” section the top links were my LinkedIn account, Facebook account, and then a few links to my grandfather’s obituary.   

Lastly, I decided to Google search “Lexi Brenner CNU” to see if I could find anything through school. The first link shown was my LinkedIn account because I reference CNU in my biography. Then was my Instagram link, Facebook link, and Twitter link. As I scrolled toward the bottom I found my old WordPress account from one of my digital humanities classes. When I clicked on the link it took me directly to one of the articles I had published on our site for class, with everything just as it was before. When I clicked on Google Images, I again saw my Twitter profile picture along with some fellow CNU students LinkedIn profile photos that I am friends with.  

Overall, I feel as though I do a good job of keeping myself private with a small digital footprint. I was proud that I only found a few pictures of myself throughout my search. Growing up, my parents always reminded me that anything and everything can be found on the Internet so I needed to be careful with what I post and share. “Online identity seems to offer a wide range of possibilities for personal presentation, role/identity adoption, and so on,” (2017) I try to have my online identity be mostly hidden to protect my privacy.  

References

Hodapp. Christa. (2017). “Men’s Rights, Gender and Social Media.” 27-51. Lexington Books.