blog 6

Hey everyone so today on the blog we are going to do some investigating, and cyber-stalking. I know everyone one of you have searched people before and looked on Instagram and Facebook and various other social media channels. But the question is have you ever actually stalked yourself on social media, to see what you social media footprint looks like. 

With this blog as I research my own social media footprint and I log out of all my google platforms and google my-self, I actually challenge all of you to do the same and really investigate yourself to see just how much you are putting out there of yourself and to see what those privacy settings that you may have though did so much to only find out they really did not do anything for you at all. LETS GO 

So the first place that I really wanted to stalk myself on was Google just because that is a

Web 2.0 platform and will search a whole host of platforms so I just wanted to see if any and if there was how much overlap there is between google and other social media platforms. So immediately upon googling myself I am meet with a ton of requests for Ryan Chriscoe Realtor out of North Carolina,

 which we all know is not me since I am currently at Christopher Newport University majoring in Communication Studies. But I actually did do some more digging into this and found out that I am related to him on my father’s side, he is one of my dad’s 45 cousins. This I believe has happened because I really do have some strict privacy settings turned on across a lot of my social media platforms. Of course I find the typical Ryan Chriscoe is on Facebook upon which clicking on that takes me to a whole list of Ryan Chriscoes’ that are on Facebook. So if I kept digging on google I did come across some really old photos of me under the images tab which was really interesting because when I started really looking more and more into this I couldn’t quite figure out where they were coming from, but in the end I found out that a couple of them were coming from my super super old Pinterest acct that I actually don’t even remember the log in information anymore, and then one was coming from twitter. But coming across my really old Pinterest account really actually got me thinking just about how many accounts do I have for old platforms that I don’t even remember. So I think all in all with just searching for “Ryan Chriscoe” It really did not turn up too much information so I wanted to try to search something else.

            I thought maybe I could being to search my entire actual name “Ryan Scott Chriscoe”. This in my opinion is where things begun to kind of get interesting just a little.  So upon searching my full name, it becomes a little more narrowed down with what I could say is a little more current and not so dated, but still it’s not pulling any major social media platforms which makes me very happy because it demonstrates to me that I have chosen the right security settings in all of my social media platforms and it just shows that I have a more tighter grasp on what my social media platforms are sharing about me and what they are allowing random people to see when they google my name. When I searched my whole name a couple more recent things came up a few being both of my grand-fathers obituaries from 2012. 

This one kind of caught me off guard just because it was something that I was really not expecting to see come up but it was because I was listed in the obituary and it was in a newspaper so I have no privacy controls over that. Another thing that came up was from my job. I currently am the Director of Sales and Marketing for a High End Publication known as 

The Scout Guide Williamsburg and The Chesapeake Bay, and we release our publication of small businesses once a year and our launch party was in Jan of 2020, and upon searching my full name a few images appeared from that night which I thought was really bizarre because they didn’t tag me as my whole name so that really got me thinking just how did google know that it was me in those images.

            But over the course of this blog and really stalking myself it really got me thinking just how safe are we out there with so many of us just putting information out there everywhere about ourselves and never really thinking about the consequences that could occur. I know for me I do try to be very careful about just how much I post and I also feel like I am very careful and meticulous about my security and privacy settings just for that very reason, but to me this just showed me that no matter how careful we are and how strong we have our security settings there are going to be things and ways to get around that for people and for people to be able to find images and information about you just like I could do with just a few google searches with my name and that being it. But also to me this just shows how strong Web 2.0 is and that to be honest the only way to ever escape being able to be found on the internet is to simply to not have ever existed which in this day in age with everyone having a camera in tow that is simply and quite frankly impossible.