Finding Myself
In seminar today, we discussed the concept of the program ‘FINGER’ in the early ARPA net. This was a program that would let you locate any user of the network, and subsequently would determine for you their last log on date. At the time, it was seen by some as an invasion of privacy; and so, the author of the program modified it to allow the person being searched to protect their information.
It seems like an interesting experiment to compare that personal invasion, the equivalent of a ‘read’ receipt, to today’s publicly available information.
So I googled myself. For the first time ever. (No, really!)
I started with my name and my state- Michigan- and I found my voting record, which tells me my hometown and my birthday. From my name and my home town, I find out that my Mom is on the school board; my grandparents own a cherry farm; my parents met at U of M, moved to St. Louis, then moved back to my hometown. I enjoy reading, and I own a bike which I call Sheila. I know what I look like, what clubs I’m in, some of my test scores and that I once made a presentation on Mao’s cultural revolution in Prezi.
I’m not sure how much of this I chose to share; it would all certainly have been more of an opt out than an opt in. I’m not embarrassed by the me I found online, just a little surprised. Of course, I shouldn’t be. I, like most other people of my age, know the power and persistence of the web.
After my senior party, I was addressing thank you notes to my guests. As I got to the bottom of the pile, I found a card from my friend Sophie. I had met her in my European History course that year, and I had never learned her address! In order to get her thank you to her, I had to know where she lived; and to know where she lived, I had to know how to spell her last name. Which, naturally, like her address, was a mystery to me. So I googled her, using all of the details I could think of, and found an old picture of her family. I used the article attached to the picture to get the name, and from there, the address. She received a prompt thank you.
The internet is a pretty marvelous tool. Neither I nor Sophie have Facebook accounts, but for all intents and purposes, we might as well. Our information shows up on the web almost as if we had put it there ourselves, offering windows into our lives, even if it can never provide the full picture of the people we are. Much like the early internet community in the face of FINGER, I find myself questioning wether this openness is good. Have I been harmed by the presence I have on the web? Probably not. But could I be, or are others being harmed by their own digital footprint? Certainly.
I don’t think about internet privacy too often in my own life. It fades in and out of my consciousness with each new credit card company hacked. Maybe I would do well to be a little more judicious about the information that spills from my life onto the net.