Google

I am working on my Masters in Applied Information Technology if you didn't know... with a concentration in Information Security. My B.S. is in Information Security as well, that being said let me give you all a bit of advice... Google yourselves every once in awhile. I normally Google myself pretty regularly but never find much because there is a famous author with my exact name that luckily hogs all of the hits; however, I decided I was going to Google my email addresses today... Holy Fuck Balls! I found out so much about myself.

I found out who my relatives were, where I lived, where I have lived, what I look like, what music I like, what books I like, where I went to school, where I graduated from, pictures that were uploaded to FLICKR many years ago, my age, and my social networking profiles. So I set about cleaning up my Internet face today, I highly recommend you all do this every once in awhile especially if you have been using the same email address or user name for many years.There is one particular site called peekyou.com that seemed to have a lot of information that I am guessing was bought from MySpace by the information about myself that I found there, including the "bio" they had on me.

Quite a few years ago I was messing around on the computer one night while I was still living in my home town, and I decided I was going to find out about the infamous Caglar Singletary, an E-town local legend, because I had just watched a documentary that he was featured in. Everyone from E-town of a certain age knows Caglar, if you don't know him by name you will know him by face when you check out this youtube clip:

Well after a couple of hours on the Internet I had found out just about everything about this guy that would have been pertinent if I was being a dickhead. Now to be fair, he is mentally handicapped so it is entirely possible that he didn't realize the repercussions of being so open on the Internet but when I say that I found out everything about him... I'm serious, I was short of one social security number and this was after about 2 hours of digging around. It was before I knew about the tools that help with this kind of thing, I probably could have come up with his SSN if I had known then what I know now. I was doing it just to see what I could find out, but not everyone is as ethical when handling other people's information.

The point of this story is not to let you all know how incredibly creepy I can be sometimes, but to let you know that you need to be aware of your "Internet Presence." We live in an information age where our very private information is digitized, which means it can be found with a little bit of effort. We put our very personal information all over Facebook, a company that has very shady and very controversial privacy agreements.

So my word of caution to you: don't pretend like you have never Googled someone before... now do yourself a favor and Google yourself to see if it is the sort of information you want the world to know, because someone might actually Google you one day and you do not want them to see your name on the dutchteens.com website.