I Guess I’m Nancy Drew Now… Cyber Sleuthing

For the Cyber Sleuthing option for this blog post, I decided to sleuth my dad, John Powell, with his consent. After a quick google search, I identified that he has a fairly limited online presence. The only platforms that he has are profiles on Linked In and Facebook. The Linked In is primarily for business purposes and the Facebook is for personal purposes.

I was able to gather quite a bit of personal information just by looking at his Facebook. I found his age, birthday, occupation, and location just by looking at his biography. I also could easily see who he is married to and that he has one daughter (me). I was surprised by how much information I was able to find regarding his hobbies, interests, likes and dislikes. It was clear to see that he enjoys many typical hobbies of a 58 year old such as watching soccer, travelling, camping, going on cruises, and spending time with friends and family.

One aspect of his life that I was not able to gain any insight into is his political views. Honestly, I think it is for the better that I couldn’t find something as controversial as politics on his digital profiles. Certain political view points may be a turn off for employers or people in general. My dad is definitely not a trump supporter, but if he was that may turn a few people off.

Here are the following critiques that I would make about his digital presence:

• His Facebook profile’s cover photo was a quote that said “pubs… the official sunblock of Ireland”. This may not be the most appropriate quote to have easily accessible on your Facebook page if an employer were to look at it. While my dad has worked for the same company for many years, if he were to change jobs, this could be a potential problem.
• He doesn’t have much of an online presence, so a lot of random information and other people came up. If he wanted to appear more trustworthy and have a clear digital identity, he could add more information and maybe create a few more digital profiles on X or Instagram.

Overall, his digital footprint is pretty good and gives a decent representation of who he is and it doesn’t have anything too bad on it that would raise alarms for people looking at it.

If you would like to see the sleuthing worksheet that I filled out, click here.

On a side note, my dad changed his cover photo to a funny picture of a deer after I brought it to his attention!

After reading the assigned article about the girl from Pennsylvania who sadly took her own life due to her battle with depression. Many people were unaware of her struggles, as her digital presence showed someone who was happy and living their best life. Social media can be dangerously misleading, as it is a highlight reel of someone’s life and does not show everything they are dealing with.

When I apply this concept to my dad’s Facebook, I think that he mostly only posts good things and highlights from his life. For example, he posts many pictures of our family’s vacations. Someone else looking at this might think “Oh wow they have such a luxurious life and can afford to go to all these places”, while in reality they only go on a big trip once a year and the rest of the time, my dad is chilling at home watching TV.

Generally, my dad is a pretty easy going guy and doesn’t have any kind of mental illness or anything he is hiding behind his facade. However, he has had some health problems such as having a heart attack, and you don’t see anything about that on his social media. Once again, we can see a focus only on the positive aspects of our life. I think it is very important that people realize that they should take the things they see on social media with a grain of salt. People only post what they want you to see and could actually be struggling with some really dark things behind the scenes that we can’t see. Unfortunately, in Madison’s case, this lead to people being unaware of how bad her mental illness was and did not anticipate her taking her own life.

After watching the Ted Talk by Jon Ronson, I became aware of the devastating effects of what we post can have on our lives. Ronson describes the unfortunate circumstances of Justine Sacco’s tweet that ruined her entire life. When internet mob mentality kicks in, they have the potential to actually ruin someone’s life and so serious harm to them. Luckily, I did not see anything too controversial or inappropriate on my dad’s profiles. I think he is smart enough to know what to post and what not to post because he can see the potential result that can come from being cancelled online.