Privacy Footprint

I searched up my name on Google. The first result was my Hudl which is old soccer highlights for college soccer recruitment. On the first page of the google search I was able to find my twitter and also my high school sports timeline. After that, I looked under the images tab and I found multiple images that I am in. However, after that, I clicked the videos tab and I was unable to find any videos of myself.


When I searched my name on youtube, I did not find any reult of myself. I added my hometown, Nyack, New York but there were still no results.

I put a search into [Spokeo](https://www.spokeo.com/search/Thomas-Shalom?phone=8452630051&state=New-York) of my name (Thomas Shalom), my email, my phone number, and my address. Despite all these specifics no results popped up revealing my identity. I expected to find myself but the only Thomas Shalom's that came up were adult men from across the nation. A total of 9 people have my name in the country on the site. Of these 9 people, only 2 of them live in New York.
I decided to search for both of my parents next. I searched my dads name and found our address and part of his phone number, although it was incorrect. Additionally, it also had information on my grandparents and aunt under family members on the website.

Afterwards I read through[ What every browser knows about you
](https://webkay.robinlinus.com) and none of it surprised me in the slightest. I have been aware of the limited privacy that we have and how much the internet and websites we visit track us, take our information, and record data about each user.

I carefully reviewed my google privacy. I needed to change my location setings. My location was way too public and I did not want google constantly tracking my location because it made me uncomfortalbe. I tried to find my timeline in google maps but I was not able to find anything, surprisingly.

I do not have facebook and I deleted tiktok but I do have twitter so I checked the privacy checkup and anything that I wanted to make more private I changed in settings.

The other day, me and two of my close friends had a full 30 minute intense argument over whether or not our phone actively listens to us. I had the opinion that our phone's microphones are constantly listening to us. It turns out that our phones track us in different, more concerning ways. According to the article *Facebook isn't secretly listening to your conversations, but the truth is much more disturbing*, "Out of over 17,000 Android apps examined, more than 9,000 had potential permissions to take screenshots. And a number of apps were found to actively be doing so, taking screenshots and sending them to third party sources." This is insane to me that this happens without our consent or knowledge. Going online is not safe for anybody and it is a constant breach of one's privacy. The other article *Data and information,” D Is for Digital, indicated that the majority of the advertisements program and personalize the ads based on past searches rather than screenshots which is slightly more comforting.