My Digital Footprint

The question came up the other day, “What digital footprint have I left on the internet, and what information about me is out there  for people to see?” It had never really crossed my mind before, due to that  I really didn’t care about that type of thing. Now that the question was in the front of my mind I sat at my desk for a moment and jotted down some things of what I thought I might find to make a comparison. I also wanted to be very thorough so I used the top three search engines available, Yahoo, Google, and Bing and also used the private settings as well(Incognito).

After about a solid hour of touring the internet and searching myself out, I had determined that my search list and findings were about the same. I had thought that I would have found many more pictures then I had, but the photos that came up were some of my favorites. I was surprised to how many  info.com site there are and how eager they are to sell my info to yo for a price between $1.99-$29.99. I went ahead and bought the two buck version and was quite amazed on how much I found out about myself. The site gave me a list of the past twenty years of places I lived, jobs I worked at, old phone numbers, known associates, and arrest records(sorry that I am not a total angel). I was hoping for a bit more out of it, but I did only pay two dollars.

My search of myself also did reveal all of my social media interactions such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Twitter. While I was under the alias settings I did go ahead and see if all of the privacy settings on each application were indeed doing what they were supposed to, and they were. There were a couple of news paper articles written about my golf in-devours that sprung up and brought back some fond memories of yesteryear, but other than that I guess as far as the internet goes, I am just a ho-hum kind of guy. The members of my family have always understood that the internet is not a safe place, and anything you express or discuss becomes public property and will most likely come back to bite you someday. All in all it was good fun and very interesting to find out what it is that people can access about me over the web of information we call the internet.

Well until next time, remember to smile, be happy, and make someone else laugh out loud.

CDR