Weekend Journal

On Saturday, some old friends dropped by for the first barbecue of the season. There's nothing better than shriveled hot dogs and a pasta salad of leftovers. Something happened that night that reminded me of an old boyfriend long forgotten, so after they left, I plugged his name into Google to see what happened to him.

The first thing that popped up on Google was a recent campaign contribution. Huntington Post has all that information online, so I clicked on the link. I could see how much he gave and even his street address. It also listed another person at the same address who also gave money to the same candidate. It was a guy's name. A roommate? So, I hit that guy's name into Google and up popped a bio on the guy's professional webpage. A quick read told me that my ex was gay and had hooked up with his partner shortly after we broke up. Nice. That explains a few things.

I called my friend Margie this morning and shared the gossip. We started talking about how little privacy we have in the age of Google. My privacy has been decimated by this blog, but even without all the blog stuff, there's still a lot of stuff out there about me. Every paper that I've written is online. There are links to my name in the acknowledgments of other people's papers. My last three places of employment have my name on a website. Some weirdo who is obsessed with girl's cross country has my race times from high school. I'm on Facebook and Linkedin. I haven't contributed money to a campaign yet, but if I did, you could find my address and then plug it into cyberhomes.com and get an aerial view of my home and get the value of the house.

I have a fairly common name, so my online identity is somewhat shielded by my online decoys. There's a girl in Northern Ireland who blogs about getting drunk in pubs. There's a woman who plays saxophone in jazz clubs. There's a swimmer in Australia. I am much indebted to my decoys, because surprisingly few people have told me that they've found my blog. I don't tell real people in my life about this hobby.

A woman recently wrote a book about tracking down her online dopplegangers, aka googlegangers. I think I would like to have a drink with my googleganger in Belfast.

My friend Margie has a very unusual name, so she doesn't have the decoys to throw off a cyberstalker. She's been writing a column for a parenting magazine, and her editor wants her to start a blog to attract a larger audience for the magazine. Margie is terrified of providing permanent evidence of herself, of becoming Google-able, of writing something hasty that will haunt her in the future.

On the other hand, there are others with fragile egos who worry that they don't really exist unless Google knows about them. For others, self-promotion is an essential part of their careers.

For me, I like the public discourse of the blogs and being Google-able is a necessary evil. I've tried to keep 11D a small blog and to omit my last name as much as possible. But it's a little futile at this point. All the gay ex-boyfriends could easily find out way too much about me.

Comments

[bj]

"I haven't contributed money to a campaign yet, but if I did, you could find my address and then plug it into cyberhomes.com and get an aerial view of my home and get the value of the house.

I have a fairly common name, so my online identity is somewhat shielded by my online decoys. "

I, do contribute to campaigns, and my name is extremely uncommon. I am completely and absolutely googleable, and it sometimes freaks me out a bit. The sixteenth or so google cite is some random thing I wrote, on a usenet post, 11 years ago (when I used to post with my whole name). I rely mostly on the fact that I can think of no reason why anyone would want to google me.

But, assuming that ignores the purely nosy people like me. I google practically everyone I know -- I can't help myself. And, it always freaks me a bit when people are completely ungoogleable, too; it's kind of like not existing.

[Amy P]

My web hygiene hasn't been perfect, but there are only 67 google references for my uncommon married name (not all of them are me), and 33,500 under my maiden name. Thanks to having one of those very, very common Scandinavian surnames, and the fact that my web life started after I got married, probably almost none of those 33,500 google references have anything to do with me.

I do have a low-key mommy and backyard blog, and I've circulated the URL to friends, relatives and in-laws (it will probably go into the 2008 Christmas cards). Knowing my sister-in-law and mother-in-law are reading restrains my subject matter a bit, but it's probably better both for me and the blog. Going off on a tangent, I really wonder how good the more confessional blogs are for the bloggers' mental health. In some cases, bloggers (and their readership) get to be codependent crisis junkies. Some of these bloggers are adept at creating a warm, supportive community--i.e. a chorus of supporters who think that everything they do and say is wonderful. I have to wonder what the effect of anonymous confessional blogging is on people with mental illness.

[Peter Juan]

I used to write under the pseudonym, "Adam Mordo" but since I blew the lid on that a long time ago I no longer have the cover of anonymity to protect my privacy. I have no worries however. My secret is two-fold, first of all, I have nothing out there that is open to the public that I don't feel comfortable sharing to the rest of the planet, this being the internet and all. The second is my

[Doug]

Well the other Douglas Merrill was until just recently a high muckety-muck at Google, so I'm just ever so slightly buried. My old social science projet usually still turns up on the first page. For someone who's about to go back to freelancing, not being on the first page is definitely a mixed bag.

The blog does well, though. It's usually #1 Google for one key word, and definitely front-page for the other. It is, however, pretty resolutely non-confessional.

[Peter Juan]

I used to write under the pseudonym, "Adam Mordo" but since I blew the lid on that a long time ago I no longer have the cover of anonymity to protect my privacy. I have no worries however. My secret is two-fold, first of all, I have nothing out there that is open to the public that I don't feel comfortable sharing to the rest of the planet, this being the internet and all. The second is my http://i.ph blog which provides me with very deeply granulated privacy controls. What this means is that I can set the privacy for each individual post and photo and practically every other single piece of content that I put up on my blog. I can select who gets to see what and it's great being able to give access to people who aren't on i.ph accounts. My audience is not limited but I can limit my audience as much as I want to. I find it liberating actually. So if there's anything sensitive that I just have to put out there, I don't stop myself from blogging, I just choose who I want to share it with. Anyway, just sharing my thoughts on this. I find blogging and privacy to be rather fascinating subjects. I may actually start a blog about blogging and online privacy in the future. Thanks for the good read. have a good day and blog on!

[bj]

"have nothing out there that is open to the public that I don't feel comfortable sharing to the rest of the planet, this being the internet and all"

I used to tell people that about posts (even semi-anonymous ones like this one. If you read laura's blog regularly, and read my comments, and you know me, you can figure out who I am, even without my name. I've done that all the time with other people.

But, though I try to remember that when I post, I am not truly comfortable with everyone on the planet knowing information about me that I can't control; the easiest to cite information is my campaign contributions & the value of my house. If you know my name (say, you're a salesman, trying to sell me a car, or a real estate agent, or someone considering my child for a spot in your school or dance class), by googling my name, you can find out an enormous amount of information about me. Hey, you can even find my salary. I do not tell everyone I meet where I live, but through the campaign contributions, everyone who knows my name (even my first is unusual enough that it might be enough) can find out where I live. I am uncomfortable about this.

Of course, this information was always public, but posting it on the internet and accessing through google-search imposes a vastly different cost on that access, compared to searching the county records in some dark dungeon.

I think there are some real privacy issues being raised by some uses of technology (google streetview, for example, and the explosion of security cameras, and the easy-access databases of public information) that we just haven't really come to terms with.

[Amy P]

We haven't even mentioned the fact that there are a lot of genuinely creepy people out there, and nowadays they're all on the internet (if only for the pron). As I was telling a troll on another site, for all I knew about him, he may stock duct tape, plastic sheeting, and a hacksaw in his car trunk and have a thing for Jody Foster.

[laura]

What worries me from time to time is that weirdos mistakenly think that they know a blogger and get hooked on him/her. I know Dooce has had problems. Someone put her actual address in a comment section on this blog and she asked me to take it down, because she was worried about stalkers. Online information about campaign contributions along with street addresses could be dangerous information in the hands of blogger stalkers.

[MH]

After reading this, I did a check. It appears that there are three people who share my name (two the whole name, one at least first, last and middle initial) and who are more prominent than I am. (This is admittedly not a high standard.) One is someone in Pittsburgh and I used to get phone calls for him when I first moved here. One used to work at the same university I did (we've both moved since) and got really irked when he got some books I ordered. And, one is in the U.K.

How strange is it that two of the three people who share my name and a have a web presence would be people that I am not related to but who live or have lived in the same city as myself?

Also, I'm going to do something because I always used to be on the first page and now I don't show-up until #19. Maybe I'll start a blog.

[MH]

I will have to do something. My dad is 100% of the google hits for his name and my brother is on the first page of his.

[Margaret in NJ]

I don't have a blog, never use my whole name on the internet, and my political contributions are so small they don't show up on HuffPo. But when I googled my name I found more than 200,000 references and some cool people: 2 professors (education and communications), a dean of social work, a cancer researcher, a pathologist, a Peace Corps volunteer, a nun, a murder victim, and a schizophrenic. I finally found myself, about 300 citations down, as the author of a paper I published 20 years ago. I guess I don't have to worry much about stalkers finding me.

[DVR security camera systems]

For teenagers now it becomes necessary...