Digital Tattoos, Round Two

"It's a digital TATTOO." by ditchthattextbook is marked with CC BY-NC 2.0.

A few years ago I did a data mine on myself to determine the extent of my digital tattoo. You can check out the details of that search in this blog post. If you're not familiar with the term digital tattoo, (sometimes referred to as a digital footprint - see Ditch That Textbook's image above), it refers to the information about you that exists online. As an educator it's important to me that my digital tattoo does not hurt my reputation or my image as a professional. It's also important to teach our students about digital tattoos and how their content online can stay around forever. When I did the data mine on myself over two years ago, I was nervous about what I was going to find but the search brought back pretty basic results. Coming back to this topic two years later, I didn't expect to find much difference in my search results, but I was wrong. 

First of all, if you're going to do a data mine it's best to search from different internet browsers as well as different search engines to get the best results. I used Chrome (make sure to sign out!) as well as Safari. When completing the search, make sure to search for your full name as well as your usernames. Wesbites like Truthfinder, Spokeo, and PeekYou will give you pretty similar and basic information about yourself: name, age, old addresses, relatives. Sure enough, my results from these websites were about the same as they were two years ago. They also will try to get you to pay for more features or give them your own personal information in order to get the full results of your search with claims like "You won't believe what we found out about Laura Rzewnicki." Check out this interesting alert that Truthfinder.com gave me. 

Screenshot taken from Truthfinder.com 

Screenshot of search results from Spokeo.com

A new search engine I tried this time around was Classmates.com. What's fun about this website is that you basically get to search your old yearbooks from high school. So, if you lost those and are feeling nostalgic, give this website a try. In order to see full pages that you appear in you will have to make a free account. One thing to keep in mind when you go to use these search engines: if they ask for your data in order to see the full search results, they are more than likely selling your data for profit. Read more about our privacy online in this blog post. Here's an example of what a search result page looked like:

Screenshot of search results from Classmates.com

Of course I got the best search results from Google. What I discovered is that over the course of completing my master's degree at Dominican University I added a bit more ink on my digital tattoo. One thing that I noticed this time that I didn't before was my YouTube account, which showed my channel subscriptions. There was nothing particularly embarrassing about this, but it was still not something I was looking to share with anyone who can Google me. So, I went into my account privacy settings and switched that from public to private. 

Another thing that popped up was my Prezi account page with multiple grad school projects that were visible to others. Unfortunately, you can only truly control the privacy of your projects if you pay for upgraded features, which I found disappointing. Mindmeister (a mind mapping application), was another site that popped up with some of my old projects. Once again, I couldn't turn off privacy settings for this site. 

I've continued to use Twitter for professional use over the last couple years. As a result, I have more images of myself, my students, and my classroom that come up in a Google search. While this practice is encouraged at my school district and our families sign releases, my mindset is starting to shift about posting so many student faces online. I am starting to rethink my own personal policy about that and I'm wanting to shift to blocking student faces when I post them online. 

The main takeaway here is that everything we do on the internet contributes to our digital tattoo. Privacy settings should always be in the forefront of our minds when we go to post anything online. Do you know for sure that you have control over the privacy of the content you are posting and are you fully aware of what those settings are? Keep in mind that some things will be seen by anyone who happens to do an easy Google search of your name.