I started by typing my cell phone number into White
Pages. With the search, I was able to
get my home county. I took note that
number isn’t associated with any spam activity as I clicked on the “View
Owner’s Name” hyperlink. Upon further
investigation, it gave a faulty neighborhood, city, and zip code. They did, however, get my carrier right:
T-Mobile. In order to get my name I
would have to sign up for a trail offer, which I wasn’t going to do.
I then looked at my hometown on American FactFinder. There, I found that my hometown has a
population of 3,243 with the median age being 43.6 years old. Also, 99.2% are a high school graduate or
higher. Only 4.8% are below the poverty
level.
Next, I tried to find myself on Yellow Pages, since before
college I did not live in Dane County. I
was unable to find myself.
Time for the great Google search! From just typing in my first and last name, I
was unable to find myself on the first page.
In fact, I wasn’t on any of the first ten pages. I didn’t bother going any further with just
given and surname, so I added my middle.
Still, no results that were me. I
tried my home state, my elementary school’s city, and finally my elementary
school. That is when I got my first hit…
with my name spelt wrong. It was for an art contest and a local
paper mentioned the winners and honorable mentions. I also had hits for the Honor Roll. That was it.
I then googled searched for my Facebooks and couldn’t find
myself. You can’t search for yourself
on Facebook without having an account, so I would be forced to find myself no
matter what. I typed in my usual
username “NoNamedSuperhero” with tumblr in google and got my YouTube channel,
Tumblr, DeviantArt, a site I entered a terrible/ quickly done design in and
pages that I liked on Tumblr and DeviantArt.
I was so excited to finally find myself that I didn’t care that my
security should be better than it is.
So who is Rachael Norman?
Well, if you do really find me, I’m basically an honors girl who draws things
and "likes" drawings… while always promising to make YouTube vlogs for her
friend. So my online puppet is pretty
harmless. But I guess I do need a little
better security...
1 comment:
Rachael-
Overall I had a very similar situation while researching myself. The generic information I found about my hometown was harmless and then after preforming a google search, little was to be found.
I was interested to see the results you had from the different accounts you have online. Unlike you, I really only have a Facebook account so I wasn't able to find much out about my personal interests. While the things found were harmless, it is interesting how by having your username you are able to find out the personality of the user through links to websites that you decide to partake in during your free time.
The differences between our results shows the effects of having more accounts online. Although it may not be negative, by having more information online it will allow searchers to find out more of the users interests and get a more complete view on who the user is.
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