How Long Is Your Digital Trail?

[Brynn]

Made me think

I entered my ex girlfriends name and managed to find out what she has been up to (ok i know it sounds stalker-ish) but i wanted to see if the writer of the article had a point.

Its quite scary as to how much information that is on the web.

 

[SilverHood]

Interesting.

I stuck my name in, and every assignment I uploaded to my private webspace showed up. Yikes.

Then I banged in my surname. Wow, descendants of old Norman lords. You may now call me "Lord SilverHood".

 

[old.user4556]

Absolutely nothing comes up about me (it used to when i was still in a band), although i looked for a girl i met at a party who was from London (and i pumped her a few times) whom i lost contact with. Google found a page about her and that she was in Italy travelling for a while.

Bit stalker-ish too, but i was so curious.

 

[Will]

My name doesn't get anything for me, but the sponsored google ads scare me. My ex gets a few clan sites, and my girlfriend turns up a lot of bellydancing and biology links to her stuff.

 

[rynnor]

I have a very common surname so good luck to any agency trying to profile me ;P I found a guy in Wigan with my exact name including my middle name so thats handy if I want to get out some fraudulent mortgate or something

I also found a bizarre photo gallery of a guy with my name - kinda disturbing...

 

[Shovel]

I periodically pump the names of people I know into Google out of curiousity. A lot of school friends that I only half speak to, for instance went through phases of having little websites and I sometimes like to see if they've still got it.

As for me: searching my name brings my blog up second on Google, first on the new MSN search and about 4th/5th on Yahoo. Finding me is not too hard. I don't really leave much of a trail though as any old webhosts I've been through have tended to take down my sites after a little while, everything current is on my own domains so nothing is likely to be found on an aging Geocities homepage. I don't really have a problem with people looking me up (unless it's to kill me), and dispite humiliating use of the English language, I still keep my old homepage designs archived and live.

I find it quite interesting. People often think about making a homepage so that the world can see what they have to say, but when they realise how big the world is it's quite scarey.

 

[kingcon]

I put my name in and ended up with this!. I can assure you that’s not me, but imagine what some one would think looking me up...

 

[Clown]

Some CS kid is giving me a bad name.

 

[tRoG]

According to Google, I'm a lumberjack.

 

[~Yuckfou~]

Oh dear :/

 

[Athan]

Combining some version of the online name I use with my real name does yield a fair number of hits, mostly very old security/linux email list posts. You do also get my home page as top hit with the full online name, but only the URL as I long since told Google to fuck off and stop indexing my site.

-Ath

 

[Jonaldo]

Nothing about me whatsoever, but that's probably because I don't know what the internet is or how to use a computer.

 

[Driwen]

entered my full name and got two hits, both actually referring to me. Allthough one is just a website naming me and was created a long time ago and the other is an old page of a lan party I once visited.
I dont have a website and use internet either to play games over or to read info. So hits on nicknames I use will be from forums.

 

[dysfunction]

I can't find anything about me!

 

[RandomBastard]

Nothing about me when you enter my name, some stuff when you enter my online pseduonyms

 

[Doh_boy]

I've a very popular Irish catholic name (john-paul) with a fairly generic irish surname so there's loads of hits non about me

 

[Chilly]

nada