Digital Tattoos and Data Mining

Making our Mark

In this day and age of social media we 'share' much of our lives online.  People in Generation Y & Z have not known a world that wasn't, at least partly, digital. There are implications to sharing all this information about us.  Life updates, and pictures of people in our lives can be either warm reminders, if they have passed on or painful ones of relationships gone sour, since many social media platforms are fond of reminding us what happened in the past.   There are other moments you may not want to be reminded of as well, perhaps a traffic offense that gets picked up in the paper, and now will forever be available should anyone perform a quick search.  Not all of this is bad or negative, but it is food for thought as to weather it should be that way.  People are capable of changing their lives, should their pasts prevent them from moving on?  These are ideas we have yet to find ways to deal with in this modern age, but food for thought.



Our digital tattoo or footprint will be following us around, so we hopefully are leaving more good to look at than bad.  I was not sure what I expected when I performed a data mine on myself.  I was mostly surprised for several reasons.  I think of my name as fairly unique, but there are many with my name out there, even several in the area.  I knew there we're other's in the area with my last name, even though they are no relation (I joke that Donofrio or D'Onofrio is the Italian equivalent of Smith), but was surprised to find a few with my first name as well.  The images only brought up one of me, which is an old Facebook profile picture of me as a toddler.  No search results yielded a current photo of me though.

I'm the one with the puppy.
Image Source: Personal Screenshot

Websites like Peek You , Spokeo, TruthFinder, and Intelius had some fairly accurate information, including my name, address, age and family.  A few searches had my last address, not most recent but I only moved withing the last year.  I had also forgotten how often I had moved around until I saw all the cities I have lived in.  Nuwber was the only site that didn't return results for me.  I also did not come up in my search for Illinois Teacher Salaries.  While I have been teaching for 11 years, only this past school year was in a school district, so perhaps the data is too new.   I was also surprised with how little came up when using Google.  My Pinterest account was the only item of mine in the first 10 results.  You had too scroll a bit to find me connected to my volunteer organization, my grandmother's obituary and my sister .  None of these we're obvious to the casual searcher though that they were me. 

Image Source: Personal Screenshot

Image Source: Personal Screenshot

All in all, I was not embarrassed or worried about what came up in the search of me, in fact I was surprised at how little there was!  I am working at creating a more professional, and visible web presence, to show my growth as an educator.

Further Reading: The Tyranny of the Internet is Forever