Searching for myself on the internet led to many discoveries, and ones that relieved me in some ways and others that surprised me in regards to how much information available on me. I started my search on whitepages.com and entered my cell-phone number. The site was able to locate my hometown and phone carrier, but nothing else. I then decided to search my address on the site. This time, I got information on the name, approximate age, and phone numbers of my parents. The site also included a list of the same information on all of my neighbors. I was surprised by this since my parents use the internet far less than I do.
Next, I went to factfinder.census.org and looked up my hometown's zip-code. All I received was general census information.
I decided to then log out of Facebook and see how hard it would be to find me. I first searched using my full name, which just led to dozens of other Paul Hermann's around the world. When I added "Wisconsin" after my name, I was the third result. Already visible was my hometown, where I live now, and the college I attend. Going onto my account page showed my cover photo, profile pick, and all of my likes and interests. Though this isn't too reveling, I was surprised that this much information was available; I thought my profile would be more restricted.
Lastly, I did a lot of Google Searches. Any variations of my full name just led to different historical people with the name Paul Hermann, such as a German botanist and a French painter. I even found the URL for paulhermann.com led to a guy promoting his own artwork. Adding "Wisconsin" after the search then showed some people-searching websites. I went on one, peoplefinders.com, but after various searches found nothing. I added "Hartford Wisconsin" to the Google search of my name, and mylife.com showed up. The site knew my street (but not the house address), age, and hometown. This was the only people-searching site able to have any information related to my name. Searches for any of my e-mail accounts found nothing, and my cell phone number just showed Hartford, WI but nothing else. Lastly, I did image searches. No pictures of me showed up, but some pictures from my high school's web site appeared. However, there were three strange, tiny pictures that I couldn't recognize that led to my Facebook account with the information I talked about earlier.
Overall, I'm relieved that it took many attempts to actually locate information related to my name on sites other than Facebook. I was surprised that mylife.com knew my age, and very startled that whitepages.com knew so much on older adults in my neighborhood, but nothing on my own name. I ended up not being too upset with the information Facebook showed, but it was intriguing how a person could view many of my interests quite easily. My digital puppet is very limited to the public. A person would have to do much searching to find my hometown, but could not link it to my cell phone or other personal contact information. However there would be much information on my interests, allowing a geodemographic firm to give lots of advertising on Facebook and sites I link with it.
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