During class last week, we spent around 15 minutes to talk about what we found and felt about the information we can find on the internet about ourselves, about our friends and family, and about random people. Someone in our group mentioned that most of the times, they look someone up with a purpose, like they heard about the person on the news or in a pop culture reference. I agreed with her but when it comes to relatively normal people, I rarely hunt them down. Most of the time it’s not a concern or worth the effort. Our group didn’t get very far into Googling each other like one of the other groups but it was was the same as my initial Google search of myself. Face, phone number, address, etc. Scary stuff, man.
After class, I started to wonder about how celebrities and politicians don’t seem to have this problem but then I guessed that they must hire people to constantly search and remove sensitive information. Lucky.
Generalized conclusions and recommendation: you could opt out of convenience services like Google services (maps, calendar, search), and social media. It’s not always in your control about what kind of information is put out there, such as pictures and location, because if you have social media, there will be times when your friend will tag you or post about you. It will really depends on how much and what kind of information you want public. Personally, I don’t mind if my picture is on the internet; I would just prefer if my phone number and address and more sensitive information was not.
If you want, you can even go further and opt out of online banking, online shopping, and memberships, which may be inconvenient in this day and age but would be safest to go analog. One thing that I would want from companies and business is for them to 1) make privacy settings more conservative as a default setting when you register (pop-up window to opt-in) and 2) be more explicit or have a phrase that they have to legally include when they sell information to third parties. Sometimes the fine print is confusing and different from company to company. However, thinking about it from the companies’ point of view, this would probably decrease the about of consumers and members so they would never agree to this. I guess it’s up to me to take responsibility for my own privacy and security.
