# Privacy Footprint

When first searching for my name on Google, nothing of me personally came up on any tab including the images or videos tab. But knowing that I have a very common name, I decided to get more specific with my Google search and decided to search my name along with my hometown to see if I would get any different results. When searching this, I got a lot more results of me, including my LinkedIn, Twitter, and articles that I’ve been featured in. When I moved to the images tab, there was a photo of my LinkedIn profile photo, and a photo that I attached to a tweet that I tweeted.

| Google result with hometown | Google result without hometown |
| -------- | -------- |
| | 

When searching the same thing on YouTube, I didn’t get any results of myself regardless of putting my hometown after my name or not. I think this is because YouTube search is much more niche as it only searches for YouTube videos, whereas Google searches for everything on the web.

I decided to search my name “Ethan Lee” along with my state, age range, and city on [Spokeo](https://www.spokeo.com). To my surprise, no results of myself came up, but I got a lot of other Ethan Lees in New York. I searched for my phone number next, and the website does have my phone carrier correct but my current location is wrong but close to where I reside at home.

I then searched for my address, and the website shows the current residents and the home value. The current residents are incorrect as none of my family members are on it but giving them the benefit of the doubt, I did just move there this summer.

I wanted to see if this website could get one piece of information right, so I decided to then search for my dad’s name. I applied the filters for his age, state, and phone number. After scrolling, I found my dad and it did have information on our current address (which is incorrect as we moved this summer, but the address was the correct address of our old house), and it had the correct information of where he has lived, and his phone numbers. It also had information on my grandparents on my dad’s side and my mom’s information once I scrolled down to family members.

I then looked at the “[What every browser knows about you](https://webkay.robinlinus.com/)” article and nothing really surprised me other than my battery information as it was super specific, knowing that my laptop is currently plugged in and at 100% charge.

I reviewed my google privacy and decided to change some settings. I decided to delete my location history after 18 months and my search history after 18 months. I didn’t change anything else. Nothing surprised me when looking through my search activity, and my google timeline seems to not be tracking me for some reason because there is no trace of where I have been even when I change the date. (Not attaching a picture for privacy reasons.) The only thing that comes up is my home address and a time stamp of when I was home, but I am not even home as I am still at school which kind of confused me.

My ad preferences did come in almost exact descending order of what I am interested in and search on Google.


It is comforting to hear that apps such as Facebook are not listening to what we say (Haridy, 2019), but what I did find scary was how there are screenshots and screen recordings being taken and sent to third parties for them to use for whatever purpose they choose. But I do believe that most of our ad preferences come from the “voluminous detailed stream of data” (Kernighan, 2017) we create as we use technology, and not from scary tactics such as screen recordings or screenshots. To me, this makes the most sense and I think that confusion about targeted ads comes from the lack of knowledge of how much data we generate as we use the web, rather than these shady, conspiracy-esque tactics.

I didn’t change any of my privacy settings on my social media accounts as I have already done that in the past and there is nothing I saw that I need to change as of now.