Quest #5 - Raising My Sleuthing Skill!

To start us off, I would just like to say that I was really worried and excited at the same time for this little 'assignment'. In this, we had to find a partner and basically stalk them on all of their social media to see how much we could find about them while writing down our findings to see whether or not what they were sharing was appropriate as a future educator, being mindful that a future student of yours could look you up and see all of this valuable information. I was extremely nervous about this project because upon googling my name I would get my old Pinterest board that included some pretty cringe content from when I was in high school, but nothing too extreme if I do say so myself, I was just very passionate about video games and anime (still am, just a little bit more reserved about it).

Anyways, my plan for this was to start with googling my partner's name, their full name I can get from their Twitter. After googling her name, I came across a really old Twitter, which I'm not sure if it was hers or not, so I figured not stay long and move on. The next link on google led me to her Instagram which was not private, going through her pictures didn't tell me a lot about her, which means she's not an oversharer! Her bio for Instagram was also not sharing a lot other than a few obvious things that I had already previously known. However, one thing that shocked me was that she linked her Snapchat link to her bio and it's not private so anyone can just add it. I'm sure she takes proper precautions when doing this though (or at least I hope) and doesn't add anyone without prior knowledge of who they are, but it's not my place to say. All of her pictures on Instagram made it seem like she was very approachable though and a very adventurous soul! After looking through a couple more pages of Google, I figured that it was probably not worth much more than what I've already got, so I decided to check Facebook next!

Ah, Facebook, what a wonderful place. I mean, through Facebook I was able to find out the town where she lived and what high school she graduated from (or went to, can't just assume). Other than that, I wasn't allowed to see any posts she posts, but, I was allowed to see some of the pages she's liked and a lot of them relate to dog rescues, which to me is awesome because that at least means she supports them or is looking to support them, which to me makes a good person at first glance! One thing I was kind of surprised about with the Google search was that I saw she was an avid volleyball player, however, there were no records or scoresheets on Google. I think that may just be because it's a team sport and they don't put individual names on those kinds of things, or maybe they just don't post them online at all, who knows!

Overall, this assignment was super fun, however, super weird as I was looking through her Instagram posts and my mom walked in and asked why I was stalking someone.. After a really long weird stare and telling her it was for an assignment, she finally believed me and moved on. However, this kind of just puts it into perspective. The ease of just going through pictures and seeing what you're doing every day if you share that information is super easy and can gather it super quickly too. It's really crazy to think about how much information you can gather from someone online depending on privacy settings. Unfortunately, this is not the first time I've had to be conscious of what I make public online as I've had a stalking issue in the past, that's why most of my stuff is under lock and key, but I think that if I were to have a professional account (such as my Twitter) I would keep that open as a small insight into my professional life, rather than personal so students can see that, but most of my personal stuff is 'relatively' hidden. This project was super fun and I really enjoyed sleuthing my partner, even if it felt a bit weird.

Thank you to my partner for allowing me to do this and gain more insight into my own postings and digital identity!