Scraping the bottom

The limits and levity of our surveillance state.

When I was an up-and-coming journalist, I Googled myself a lot. It was satisfying to see my personal social media pages drop lower and lower as I had more work published and at larger outlets that garnered more traffic. It’s how I learned that one of my most widespread works was a photo of dairy cows I took on impulse by the side of a road. My dairy article that ran with said cows was picked up by the Associated Press (AP), which meant news outlets all over the world could use it. I imagine that for about a year, everyone who wrote about dairy logged into AP said “Oh thank god, a new cow photo,” and ran with it.

That’s also how I found my Muck Rack profile. Muck Rack scrapes data on journalists and creates profiles documenting everything we publish. On the profile there’s a blurb that reads “Is this you? Create a profile to make changes.” I’ve never created a profile. Out of spite. 

As the Tone Madison team was hanging out the other day, Music Editor Steven Spoerl said that Muck Rack has gone off the rails recently. Something about Tone‘s website has thrown its scraping mechanism, because stories have two to five authors bylined. Some of those authors are people who edited the piece, which is strange but understandable. Maybe it’s picking up some weird metadata. But there are articles with my name on them that I’ve never touched. Even stranger, there are articles with bylines for freelancers who have zero connection to the piece. They don’t have access to other freelancers’ Google Docs, much less our publishing system. Hell, there’s people listed who I have never heard of. 

But the byline that broke me was “a Locker Room.” Yes, that’s lowercase “a,” uppercase “L,” uppercase “R.” “a Locker Room” has its own profile where it’s not only been published in Tone Madison, but in The Telegraph, Inc., and Freakonomics.

It reminded me of a weird data-scraping discovery I made years ago. Once again, I was Googling myself and found a website that had compiled an unsettling amount of personal data about me. All of my addresses, all of the schools I went to, the names of my parents, siblings, grandma, even aunts, uncles, and a few cousins, all on a site I’d never heard of.

But the site also said that around 2007, I had changed my last name. Actually, in 2007, I moved to China. I assume the website couldn’t find anything on me, so an assumption was made that I had married and changed my last name, so they turned me into a whole other person. Last I checked, Other Christina was earning $200k and living in a Chicago brownstone valued at $1.3 million, which raises a whole other host of questions: Did Other Christina marry rich? Did she get a foreclosed brownstone for pennies on the dollar in the financial crisis? Is there Lieffring money she knows about that I don’t?

Years ago I checked my Facebook interests, just to see what a decade of data has told them about me. The answer: not much. There was a list of gendered assumptions, like makeup and shopping—nothing wrong with either of those, but they are not of particular interest to me. There were movies and TV shows I’ve never heard of, much less seen. And there were items that were just weird, like “teeth” and “sheeple.”

I guess it’s oddly reassuring that even though companies and systems are constantly monitoring and profiling us, some of them are still really bad at it. At least, it’s reassuring as long as there aren’t real consequences. I hope Other Christina is on the straight and narrow, but I also like to imagine some goons telling her, “It’d be a real shame if something happened to Greg and Lisa*.”

“…Who?”

*Obviously not my real parents’ names. Gotta keep ’em guessing.