# Privacy Footprint

### Images:

#### Google Searches:
All:

Images:

Videos:

#### Intelius Search (of my father):

#### What Every Browser Knows about Me:

#### Google:

Search Activity:

Timeline in Google Maps:

Google Ads Preferences:

### Response:
The notion of privacy, anonymity, and safety on the Internet could be stripped away from the security we feel in mindlessly perusing the internet: everything is being tracked and traced. In the case of Cara McGoonan’s “How did Facebook get my number? And why is it giving my name out to strangers?”, her growing concern with Facebook’s unwanted access to her phone number, and provision of her name to anyone who had her number, led her to being fearful of possible malicious targeting. If one’s name, phone number, and associative photos had all been made public because their phone number had been linked in an unverifiable way to their account, through others contacts or other information, Facebook reasons that anyone with access to the phone number can justifiably also have access to the name of the person and other account information; the potential concern with this arises in the use of random phone number generators, where criminals could potentially skim surface, or even deeper levels of information just by clicking a button on their computer.
In trying to perform this operation on myself, I soon realized that much of the information associated with the name “Platzman” gets quickly drowned out by Daniel Platzman, the drummer for Imagine Dragons. While some outstanding information comes by way of Facebook, HackMD, and my high school’s research group, a quick Google search does not yield much information about myself. The more daunting information comes when performing an Intelius search of my father, where the database was able to spit out all of the phone numbers he had ever had, including home, work, and cell phone numbers. On top of this, the database had information about my personal family, such as relatives, and locations.
A deeper dive into more personal levels of information yielded a clear distinction between my results when relaxing and when studying, showing a high concentration of Youtube results in the former, and Northeastern related material with the latter. On top of this, Google is able to geolocate your devices in order to associate your searches with areas, in a way that makes it seem like it knows what you are looking for before you do.
With regards to privacy, I am fearful of the capability of websites like Facebook that are able to easily infer and self-verify data from the abundance of users they have to automatically pin a profile with personal identifiers. Alongside, McGoonan’s concerns for the potential of this information to make far more data become openly available, it is vital that people take measures to protect their information, and to differentiate what should be made public or private online.