Describe your experience trying to uncover information about your classmate and the followup discussion in class.

In this assignment, we were tasked with ‘snooping’ on our classmates as an exercise in online privacy/online reputation. Previously, I’d expected that the only data we could find online about someone was what they chose to make publicly available – their social media, their blogs, etc.

After completing this exercise, I was intimidated by how easily data could be found on people. The digital age has come with incredible access to communication and knowledge; to our fellow man and his expertise but… as a drawback, nearly everything you could ever hope to learn about someone is online somewhere nowadays. That’s terrifying to me! With some clever search engine legwork and a few publicly-available online tools/sites, you can uncover people’s addresses, families, occupations, residence history, crimincal records, etc. etc. etc. – SO MUCH INFORMATION.

Ultimately, the exercise taught me that protecting my online information is both necessity and futile. Some information will forever be publicly available and the information that you choose to put online is incredible important to protect or filter.

Scary stuff. Sca-ry stuff.