Is anyone else alarmed that when you google your Fluther screen name, your profile page shows up?

Go ahead and google all your screen names from other sites too… Big Brother doesn’t have to watch anymore.. we give him all he needs voluntarily.. xD

I just did and the weird thing is, there are a lot ‘jmahs’, but, most of them are not me. I didn’t think that there would be many ‘jmahs’ out there.

Nothing on the first 10 pages of results.
No worries here.

… it also brought up a myspace i didn’t know i had. i never knew i used myspace…

That’s why I picked a very nondescript, generic name. There are too many “Les“eses out there to have my profile come up on the first hit.

I agree with you Alfreda. If anyone from Sweden is looking for Jons Blond, they will find me all over the first page.

Not at all. They have no idea who Likeradar actually is. It’s one of the main reasons I didn’t use my real name.

Wicked! I am not surprised though. I read a study some where that said here in the near future all of us will be published via online blogs or really anything we post online. The name I use here is the name I use for other website I use as well. I guess I am just easy to track online.

This is a public forum, is it not?

Almost any profile on any social network ends up in Google, especially if you use a really unique screen name. To be honest it seems you are sort of freaking out over nothing, for instance @AlfredaPrufrock your name gets searched less than 0.03 times per day, that is less than one search per month. I also looked up @jonsblond, @fireside, and @Likeradar finding that all of your names get far less than one search per month and this number represents all search engines, not just Google.

My name didn’t show up. @AlfredaPrufrock, when I clicked the link I didn’t get your profile, I got a picture of Ben saying they couldn’t findyour profile.

@SuperMouse – that is because she must have just deleted her account. Click on her name in this thread and you get the same thing.

@drClaw Good point.

It’s sort of funny when you think about it, the only person who probably ever searched for @AlfredaPrufrock was herself and she just closed her entire profile down because of it. She violated her own privacy.

@drClaw How do you know how much a name is searched? It said it took .32 seconds for mine..is that the number you mean??

Nope, Online Marketing is my profession and I have access to tools that record data from Search Engine logs making it really easy to run a report on the names I mentioned earlier.

Well, I wish she waited to hear your stats @drClaw before she went and deleted herself.

I hope she calms down and comes back :^(

I don’t think it was her Fluther screen name she was worried about others seeing. Just that the internet is a tangled web of personal and private info if you’re not careful.

I think if people don’t realize that you can google anything, then maybe they should stay off the internet

When I google my screen name, it takes me to a calendar of May year 2609 haha

Now, the question(I believe) is why are we Googling ourselves?

8710 Lurve and it’s just occuring to her that others can she what see is writing and find out stuff about her? Hmm…

The other day I googled my fluther screen name and looked at the “image” results and I got THIRTEEN pages of fluther avatars. Pretty much anyone that had ever replied with an @adreamofautumn showed up. Also some really twisted twitter search that wis.dm had set up so that every time someone writes the word “wis.dm” in their twitter it catches it. That alarmed me more than my profile page would since I have no interaction with wis.dm other than those that are now on fluther. So weird.

@Shecky_Johnson It’s fun, and sometimes a little frightening to see what’s out there about you.
I just don’t understand why someone who is really concerned about privacy would use their real name in any forum. I really don’t give a hoot about who knows what about someone named Likeradar. If it were my real name, and employers, friends, family, etc could associate what I write here with the real me, that would be a serious issue.

I hope Alfreada comes back under a pseudonym.

When I google VS, I get a lot of Victoria’s Secret stuff and of course, “versus’ as in Kramer VS. Kramer. Nothing about me, but then I didn’t post my full, and relatively unusual name, either.
I don’t worry too much about that kind of stuff, google my given name and you will likely get several million hits since it’s nearly as common as Mary Smith.

@casheroo: yeah, but you can’t google Chung Ram.

Do people here use the same screen name for other sites? How many people in your personal life even know your screen name? I’m not worried about it.

Not alarmed because there is no real protection online so I know I take my chances with what I share, fake name or not. One of the pitfalls I’ve learned with camaraderie comes a sense of security that really doesn’t exist and it only takes one unbalanced person to focus on you and the fun turns scary.

The one reason I didn’t delete my facebook acct. and gave it second look is because of the privacy and filter features, especially the one that prevents people from finding your profile through googling. That’s one thing that would be great for sites like fluther to have.

It seems she deleted her account

The first four pages of search results are all me.

Me! Me! Me! Me! Me!

It’s very unlikely to be her real name. It’s an allusion to the T.S. Eliot poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” familiarly known as just “Prufrock.”

This makes me so sad. I lurve Alfreda! I hope she comes back with a different name.

Yes, she seemed nice. Very sensible.

Oh, I see T.S. Elliot. I know too little about classic english literature. I must get to know these guys. Tennyson, Byron and the lot. But there is so much to read. Not sure what is the essentials. I sometimes wish I went into literature instead of computing.

Eliot is one of the essentials.