Vanity Search

     I tend to be a very quiet, reserved person and don’t really put myself out their much. The internet, much less social media as not been around my whole life.  I honestly haven’t gotten many accolades, been on a winning sports team, been a top executive, arrested, been married, or had a heavy online presence (and when I have been online, I have tried hard to be as private as possible-which I’ll explain a bit later) so I wasn’t expecting too much and I didn’t. I didn’t find nothing, but it wasn’t much at all.  When I went to google and just typed in “Laura Massey” there was nothing until 6-page search and that was that was people finder page called Spokeo and it mentioned some of my closest relatives (parents and brothers) and cities that I have lived in. There was addition search result with similar info on the same page for peoplefinders.com that produced the same results. There were several obituaries, a Microsoft executive, a British professional cyclist, photographer, doctor, and many more Lauras.

     Even during the google search of Laura Masseys facebook profile pictures, my doesn’t come up because of the privacy settings if I am not logged into Facebook.  I next tried the images and found this picture from a twitter post last year https://twitter.com/lakelandmassey5 and then, of course, the video, I looked through page 10, but there was nothing.

     I then tried to see if I could narrow down my google search by putting my full name, “Laura Jean Massey” and see if there were more results.  The third results was a people finder page called whitepages.com and I was the first one who popped up. This one had more information that included my exact address, which kinda bothered me, but a couple fewer relatives. The truepeopleseach.com may have been the most disturbing, with current and several past addresses, and current and past phone numbers. The email addresses were not current and a couple relatives were not mine.  The outcome of people searcher was greater with my middle name added. With Laura Jean Massey there were no videos or images in the search.

     I decided I would try “Laura Massey” Lewisville this that is the city where I teach and this sweet reminder was the first one that came up. https://cisnt.org/note-of-encouragement/ This will also explain why I try and have as private as possible impact, especially on social media.  I am a foster parent and I really try to honor their privacy. They are old enough that I can add pictures of them, with their permission, but I still try and be very aware of not bringing attention to who they are. The second search result was my school, identified as a 5th-grade teacher with my email address.  My Spelling City profile showed up as well as this link that showed that I was grant recipient way back in 2010 https://www.lisdef.com/teacher-programs/grants/past-recipients-grants/ When looking at the images, the picture of the boy holding the card showed up on the first row, right next to a picture of my brother. I was able to see a couple of school pictures that I had posted plus a roadrunner that is our school mascot that was associated with me.

     When I tried Bing the results were similar. I saw more hits for Twitter pages so I thought mine might come up in the first 10 pages, but it didn’t. What did come up was my profile picture on Twitter that was on the second row of images. Bing did my school youtube channel which hasn’t been posted in for 5 years and has one whole subscriber.

     I then tried duckduckgo.com and there were no additional results to share.

     I would conclude this activity to say that while I am glad I was not able to find many personal things about, I do wish I had more of a professional footprint.  For someone who is majoring in Educational Technology Leadership, that footprint needs to be a bit bigger. It will be a goal of mine to display some of what I have achieved in the classroom and showcase some of what I have done and my abilities.