The Boston Globe had an article recently on how difficult it is to be anonymous in the internet age. Reading the article compelled me to perform my every-once-in-a-while "googling" of myself. What I found was pretty interesting.
First of all, I'm not keeping a very low profile. There were approximately 23,000 responses to the search query on my name (541 if you put my name in quotations.) Most of the front page stuff was computer related. A post on an old blog of mine about a web programming framework; several links to my posts on the Norton Protection Blog; a patch I submitted to an open source project more than 5 years ago; a link to my LinkedIn profile.
Some of the results were more personal. A blog post about hunting for wedding venues in Connecticut (complete with typos), a link to my Facebook profile is in there somewhere, and a list of people in my high school graduating class.
Finally, there are some results that aren't even about me. Apparently there is an Adam Schepis who is/was a pretty good college baseball player.
If one of the readers of this blog was to perform the same search how much would they know about me? What kind of person would they think I am? I frequently Google the names of people that I'm going to interview to see what kind of web presence they have.
I think that people are becoming more aware of how identity theft can occur based on what they post online but how many people are aware of the online identity they are creating through all of the online interactions they make? If I Googled your name what would I find?
It is hard to keep a low profile on the internet so you might as well be aware of who the internet thinks you are.
