After hearing everyone present their blogs yesterday in class, I heard a lot of people talk about how when they were younger they would always Google themselves for fun. Nowadays it is not considered fun or cool if you have the most information about you on the internet.
I haven't Googled myself in while so I reluctantly thought I would give it a go. The first place I looked was Google Images and there were a decent amount of photos of myself of pictures I posted on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube thumbnails and even an old picture of my mom and I from an article I wrote about her awhile back. I was not surprised to see these pictures pop up because I know I post pictures of me on Facebook and Instagram all the time so no wonder why I would see some of them on here.
Then I just regularly Googled myself to see what websites would come up and this is where it got a little bit weird...
As I was scrolling I came across a website called MyLife.com. Before clicking into it, it had said "Background Information Found on Leah Hershberger, Haddonfield NJ". So I obviously had to click on it because I had never heard of this website before and I was genuinely worried about what "background information" they had on me.
It knew where I was from, how old I was and even told me what my online reputation score was. I'm still not quite sure what that means but my rating was a 3.25/5. On the right hand column there was a tab saying "Leah's Criminal Records". Now I know for sure that I do not have a criminal record so this made me think they made one up or they just want me to click on it to see if I in fact have any or not. I clicked it and sure enough it wanted me to pay a large chunk of money to view "private" information on me. They also stated that the number of other websites that know all of my information is pretty high, almost too high. This made me worry because I would have never known about this website if I did not Google myself in the first place.
I did another Google search on this website and came across an article written by Fox13Now.com.
They wrote about how a woman found this website with her name, address, email and her profile picture was a photo of her three year old daughter. I know right? So scary.
According to Fox, "In 2008, the site now known as classmates.com faced a class action lawsuit accusing the company of false advertising and deceptive marketing. Tinsley settled, paying $9.5 million. Then again in 2011, the site now known as MyLife.com faced another class action suit claiming they were using similar tactics under a new name, but that suit was later dismissed".
From now on I am going to be very careful with what I put out there on the internet because websites like this one is not a joke and it's real. Do you dare to Google yourself now?
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