Self Stalking

After self-stalking myself and exploring the various social networking sites that I currently use, I was extremely surprised by the marginal amount of information one can find on myself. I have conducted searches on myself in the past and clearly remembered finding much more knowledge about my upbringing, but failed to find many of those sites due to stronger security measures. At first I looked up my phone number on Whitepages.com. Upon entering my phone number, one is initially able to find out my cell phone carrier, area code, and most importantly that I live in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. Then on Factfinder.com, my specific zip code leads to ones understanding that there are 29,458 residents and a 2010 census indicates that there is a strong Hispanic/Latino presence. With a little more in-depth research one can easily find very precise depictions of where I currently live and the direction in which the city is headed. Accessdane.com provides a quite specific analysis of where I currently live on campus, contributing to ones overall understanding of my apartments location close to campus. This website offers an overhead photographic shot of my apartment, assessment summary, tax summary, and even the local school district. When I do a specialized search of the Los Angeles County, it indicates an increasing population of more than 9 million people in the year 2010. Also when compared to other counties in the neighboring states it is clear how culturally diverse Los Angeles has become over the years. The Geodemographic representation of my existence is common to my previous understanding of my hometown and wasn’t as surprising as I might have expected, but was definitely interesting to see.

When conducting a social network analysis on myself I was rather surprised how secured most of my information was, but it is rather unsettling knowing that my email is the first thing to appear. My Facebook, Linked-in, and Myspace pages are all set to the highest security setting where it is virtually impossible for the average person to gain access to the multiple accounts. I was glad to see that zero images appeared on the Google search, which ultimately concealed my visual identify. Whitepages.com indicates that there are three other people in the world who share the same full name as me specifically because my Last name is relatively unique. A general Google search similarly leads to little information about myself and disguises most of my activity on the Internet. I do immediately notice that there are a decent amount of related searches on Ancestry.com and searches about my heritage. This is due to the extensive amounts of research that I have piloted on myself in the past to come up with answers to many of the questions I frequently ask. Although these searches have been explored years ago, they still appear on the front page and provide past key-words on searched topics. Overall I am quite content with the amount of knowledge one can learn about myself from a basic Google search and am pleased to see that most of my identity is shielded. More importantly, I’m happy that all of the social networking sites are on the highest privacy setting refusing to give access without my consent.