Living on the Grid

I always knew that all of my data was being gathered and aggregated and sold to the highest bidder. It's part of the price we pay to live on the grid. Credit card purchases, travel patterns, websites I visit, and yes, even the groceries I buy are now fodder for marketers everywhere. Google presents ads that are based on the content in my Google email. This is capitalism at its very best. If there's a buck to be made, someone will exploit me and my privacy.

So I knew that intellectually, and of course I've been Googling myself every month or so to see what turns up under my name. Usually, it's all stuff I was aware of already, though it is sometimes a bit shocking to see a photo of me at a charity event or read a comment I made on someone else's blog. Big, flashing, orange and yellow neon sign: PUBLIC - PUBLIC - PUBLIC.

Today I was nonplussed to click through the White Pages ad for Erin Landeck. And I'll tell you what I found about someone else on that site, because everyone and her grandmother can find the very same thing: There is another Erin Landeck that lives in Lansdale, Pennsylvania at 18 Windsor Court. Her middle name is Denise. She's 35. She lives with Jackie, Robert, and Lindsey there in her house on the dead-end street with a stream running behind it. Couldn't see her house, though, because Google didn't send 360-degree cameras roving around her neighborhood like they did mine. Oh, and if she gets real sick, there's a hospital just down the street from her. Buried on page 6 of the links to pages that contain Erin Landeck (the first five pages are links to me), I see that she graduated in 1992 from Brandywine High School in Niles, Michigan. She's also lived in Mishawaka, Indiana and Granger, Indiana. Her maiden name is Burgess. If I wanted to pay just 95 cents, I could get a report with her birthdate, phone number, and relatives. For just $14.95, I could also get a report with birth, death, divorce, and property records related to Erin. I can pay someone else to check her criminal record.

And that Erin, I'd have to say, is pretty much living under the radar as much as possible because I can't find anything else about her in the first 10 pages of Erin Landeck links on Google. I, on the other hand, am a different story. You can see the books I've authored and edited, organizations I've given money to, my career history, my business websites, where I'm on the board of directors, where I teach and what I teach, and soooooo much more. But, are you ready for it? Here's the kicker. On the very same site where you can see my age, my husband's name and age, my address, and other cities I've lived in, you can click through to a site called MyLife.com to see my profile (if you register for free). And what do suppose is there, before you even register on the site? My profile photo from my not-public Facebook page. Can you say copyright violation? Yes, I've contacted them. We'll see.

As much as I like all of the really cool free stuff I have access to because someone is making money off of selling my deets (this blog, Google Analytics, Google docs, the Internet in general, directions and maps, the Google search engine), I'm still struggling with the fact that the tradeoff is that nothing is really private. In fact, so many things about me are not private, and they're not things I would have chosen to share with the world. How public does my life have to be if I live on the grid?