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Monday, October 27, 2014

Trevor Hogg on the Internet

When I searched for my zip code on the FactFinder website, it gave me a couple tables of demographics of people within my zip code. The majority of people in my zip code were between the ages of 20-24, and that is accurate of me as well. My phone number is still registered to Milwaukee, where I used to live even though I don't live there any more. The area in which I live is overwhelmingly white, with only 1% of the population identifying as black. In searching myself on Facebook and Twitter, all of my tweets were easily seen by an outside party, but only my likes and interests were viewable on Facebook. A geodemographic firm would see me most likely as a white college-age male attending the University of Wisconsin Madison who likes tennis, Catch-22, and Domino's Pizza.

As I Googled my name in various formats, the most common Trevor Hogg that popped up often was a saxophonist from Toronto, who is seemingly widely acclaimed. It was pretty difficult to find myself by simply typing in "Trevor Hogg" or "Hogg, Trevor" because I did not make an appearance in the Google search results until the 6th page with my contact info for a student organization that I lead here on campus. What I found disturbing however was that there was a site called intelius.com, in which it knew my name, my age, where I have lived in the past, as well as the names of my immediate family members. Fair to say that creeped me out, because I have no idea how it could have made those connections. Scary stuff.

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