Isabel Schnaidt Blog #6

Ever since I was a kid, I was told to be careful about what I did online. I think my parents were mostly worried about online predators at first, though this gradually shifted to incorporate more concerns. As I grew older, the cautionary tales about Internet safety switched to the familiar warnings of “what you post online will be there forever!” and “your future boss will see everything you do online!” I took these warnings to heart and practiced a lot of caution, but I never tested to see if my efforts actually worked. Now, I will finally examine my online activity to discover what people can find out about me with a simple Google search, which will show me if my caution was worth it or not.

To conduct this experiment, I decided to use both Google and DuckDuckGo, a search engine that emphasizes privacy and makes a point to not personalize your search results. This means that it shows the same results for everyone who searches for the same terms. I was curious to see if there would be any difference across search engines, so I decided to compare the results against each other.

I began with a simple Google search of my name. The top results were my LinkedIn profile, a couple links to a website I worked on in a summer internship, the Facebook page of the summer internship, and some CNU news announcements that contain my name. This was about what I expected. Since I don’t have many public social media accounts, I figured it would primarily be professional and academic content.

The one unexpected thing was a Google Books result of a book called Army Life: Up Close and Personal. When I was in third or fourth grade (in 2006 or 2007), some neighborhood kids and I helped take the flag down for the daily ceremony on the army base that I lived on. This book contains details of what happened that day, and while I vaguely remember a woman taking notes and interviewing us, I never could have guessed that what I did would be memorialized on the Internet over ten years later!

I’m not in this picture, but I recognize my childhood friends. I’m surprised that this came up with just a Google search!

When I compared my Google results to my DuckDuckGo results, I found that they were very similar. DuckDuckGo also listed my LinkedIn profile as the first result, as well as links to CNU publications and previous internships. However, this search also contained a link to a site called Intelius that gathers personal information on people and sells it, and had my mom’s name listed! I knew that companies often sell consumer data to advertisers, but I was surprised to see a site that sells personal information to literally anyone who signs up. Upon looking into it, there are steps that can be taken to remove your data, but I am still surprised that this is legal.

This side-by-side comparison of my Google and DuckDuckGo results shows how they were very similar, but still had some differences.

The next thing I did was image search for myself to see if what came up was accurate. After Google Imaging myself, only one image was remotely related to me, and it was a picture that I used in a blog that I wrote for an internship.

This is the image I used in a blog post, and it is now forever linked to my name on Google.

The rest of my Google Image results were not of me, but a female bodybuilder named Diana Schnaidt. While I don’t think I’m related to her, I believe that she is the only remotely famous person with my last name.

This is a picture of Diana, the only famous Schnaidt.

The image search on DuckDuckGo actually had different results from Google, which surprised me. The only thing that related to me this time was an image that I used in a different blog post, at a different internship, which seemed to be a common theme.

I'm not in this picture, but I used it in a blog post, so it is at least tangentially related to me!

The rest of the images were of other female bodybuilders like Diana or family pictures of complete strangers. I think that if my family posted more pictures on Facebook, there might have been a family picture of ours in the results. However, my parents are even more cautious about protecting their personal information than I am, so they put next to nothing on Facebook. I don’t think my mom even has a profile picture! I always thought that this was overkill, but after seeing how hard it is to find my data online, I actually think it was a very good decision.

The next thing that I decided to do was to search Google and DuckDuckGo for my name along with a social media platform’s name to see if anything other than my LinkedIn would show up. Searching for “Isabel Schnaidt Facebook” didn’t bring up my personal Facebook page, but the first result was the Facebook page of an internship I worked at. Looking up my name with Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Tumblr gave me even less relevant responses. There were mostly things related to Diana Schnaidt, links to CNU news, and my assignments on Wordpress.

I tried the same thing on DuckDuckGo for comparison’s sake. Looking up my name and Facebook on DuckDuckGo brought up the same Facebook page that Google displayed, but also a random one that shared an article I wrote for another internship. Just like Google, I wasn’t able to access any other social media accounts.

I then decided to look into the only social media account that did appear when I Googled my name, which is LinkedIn. However, since I was logged out of everything, I was unable to actually look at my profile. I found it slightly reassuring to know that someone without an account would be unable to see my LinkedIn. But, when I checked my LinkedIn settings, it said that my basic information and profile picture were set to public, so I’m not sure why I was unable to see my profile when completely signed out. 

Because I wasn't logged in, this is all I could see of my LinkedIn.

Since I couldn’t get to my other social media through Google or DuckDuckGo, I decided to manually type in the links to see what I could view. I started with my class Twitter account, and I was able to see all of my information because it is required to be public. But, I never actually got around to setting up a profile picture or header, so it looks like my forgetfulness helped to protect my information. Other than than, the tweets say which school I go to, but that information was already obvious from the CNU news in my search results.

This is a screenshot of my class Twitter account, which has so little information on it that it almost looks fake.

The only other social media platform that I use with any identifiable information is Facebook, since I don’t use my real name or any identifiers on any other platform. I typed in the link to my profile into the incognito window where I was signed out, but was told that the link was broken. When I tried to alter the URL further, I was told that I had to sign in. I don’t know if the link was actually broken or if this is how Facebook protects profiles that are set to private, but either way, someone without a Facebook account will definitely not be able to see my Facebook page!

This is the error message I got from Facebook when trying to see my profile.

Overall, this exercise showed me that my digital footprint is very small. Not a lot of personal information came up when I searched for myself and most of my social media accounts are difficult to access, which is exactly what I want. The main kind of information that appears when I look myself up is professional or academic, with the exception of the book that referenced a childhood event of mine.

My digital footprint is very much curated to appeal to the audience that I imagine, which contains potential employers. Imagined audiences are the audiences we believe that we’re communicating with on social media, since we don’t know who our actual audience is (Marwick & boyd, 2010, p. 115). One of the tactics of presenting an “authentic” but idealized self to this imagined audience is self-censorship, which Marwick and boyd note is particularly useful when the imagined audience consists of “parents, employers, and significant others” (p. 125). Since I definitely conceptualize employers as part of my imagined audience for my online activity, I only want to present things that I would be okay with them seeing.

This also told me a lot about the way that I “brand” myself. Web 2.0 is partially defined by an ideology of self-branding, where users are encouraged to marketize and commodify themselves (Fuchs, 2017, p. 36). My concern with how I might be perceived by employers or other important individuals demonstrates that I want to brand myself as very hire-able. This is especially noticeable in the way that I set most of my social media to private, but not LinkedIn, which is a site specifically for business professionals who want to network with each other (Shah, 2016).

There is so much personal data available online!

This exercise also showed me what I objectively already knew about online privacy, but applied to myself: there is very little privacy on the Internet, and things that are put online can stay there forever.

Privacy can be defined in multiple ways. It could be the ability to withhold or divulge information about oneself, or the ability to limit others’ access to one’s private information (Stroud & Henson, 2017, p. 22-23). But no matter how you define it, the amount of information that I found about myself online indicates that there is very little privacy on the Internet. Some of this information was more willingly divulged than others, but it is all equally available for all to see.

Additionally, while there are ways to opt out of certain services, it would be very hard to visit each of these individual websites and follow all of their different opt-out or account deletion policies. Google only removes search results in very severe circumstances, so simply wanting to have less of a digital footprint is not going to be enough for them to help. Therefore, things like the story of my childhood afternoon folding a flag will be online forever, whether I like it or not.

Google's policies on removing search results say that you need to contact the website owner or have a very serious reason for Google to remove it themselves.

As it turns out, the warnings my parents gave me were absolutely correct. Even though I’ve been very careful with how much personal information I put online, there was still more than I expected. There need to be more discussions about the rights a person has over their own information, but in the meantime, I will continue to heed my parents’ warnings!

References

Fuchs, C. (2017). Social media: A critical introduction. Sage.

Marwick, A. E., & boyd, d. (2010). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society 13(1), 114–133. doi:10.1177/1461444810365313

Shah, S. (2016, May 14). The history of social networking. Digital Trends. Retrieved from https://www.digitaltrends.com/

Stroud, S. R., & Henson, J. A. (2017). Social media, online sharing, & the ethical complexity of consent in revenge porn. In A. C. Scheinbaum (Ed.), The dark side of social media: A consumer psychology perspective (pp. 13-32). New York, NY: Routledge.