Vanity Search

I must say after my "vanity search" I did not like what I see. Although I am thankful that my digital presence is related to education. One of the returns for web pages is radaris.com. This site I feel is very intrusive to my personal information. It has names I have used in the past (past marriage), my maiden name and current name. For a fee someone can get more information on me (very scary)!  The most surprising result was from mocavo.com. After clicking on the result I found listed for all the world to see was information on my divorce that even included names, date of marriage and divorce, number of children, along with the marriage certificate number. The site stated the information was acquired from Texas Department of State Health Services. The positive side of mocavo is it might be very useful for my genealogy research.

Upon completing the Google picture search the results show every picture I have ever used on my blog come up in a picture search under my name. Pictures from my Google+ account are listed and also pictures from my Facebook (no surprise there). This has me thinking about changing privacy settings.

After conducting a vanity search I will stress the point to my students the importance of being aware of their own digital footprints. There are sites that take our information and post it to the world if we like it or not, but we do have control of most of our information that is displayed to the world. I was just surprised with all the information I wasn't aware that was available to anyone. The vanity search was an eye opener and although we do have control over most of the information, there are records and personal information that we have no control over that is shared with the world.