Cyber Sleuthing a Friend... Or am I Just Stalking?

When asked to cyber sleuth someone, I was excited to see what I could find and what I would be able to tell about that person. It is important to me to have a positive digital identity, so when people look me up, they truly understand who I am and what my aspirations are. I have googled myself many times before, all starting back in my ESST 317 class with Katia and Audrey, and therefore, chose to not cyber sleuth myself but a friend of mine, Daniel St. Jacques.

First thing I knew I needed to do was to log out of Twitter and Facebook, so my search engine would not immediately bring him up when I typed in his name (I may have forgot about an Incognito window). When I did that, suddenly I could not find him at all because there are SO many Daniel St. Jacques. Then I had to get smarter and take it to the next level, so I typed: Daniel St. Jacques Moose Jaw (because I knew that is where he is from).

What showed up, you ask??

1st: Facebook: I was able to see he works for the YMCA Before and After School Program (same as me, how neat!) and his many past jobs like working at RONA. I was able to see he has a nickname, Danny, as this was in brackets by his name. Also, he goes to school at the University of Regina for Education and lives in Moose Jaw. I was able to see a limited amount of photos, as he had many privacy settings.

2nd: His blog where I was able to see his journey through school this far. He had resources such as unit plans where I was able to see how he plans as a teacher, his teaching philosophy which I felt allowed me to know him better, who he is and his various blogs he had in other classes.

3rd: Twitter: His bio gave a lot of great information about who he is and what he is passionate about, such as teaching (obviously). He has various pictures which provides insight into what he looks like. I see he is a person who doesn’t tweet a lot, only periodically, but when he does, I can see he is sharing information that aligns with his teaching philosophy and what he is passionate about. Another interesting thing that I found about his Twitter is a lot of the information that popped up on DuckDuckGo (something I discovered through a classmate, Andrea) was many of his retweets from Twitter, which again demonstrated his teaching passion.

4th: Linked In: Very limited amount of information on this site and did not even include a photo of him. All the information that was provided was that he was from Moose Jaw and he went to École Ducharme from 2010-2013.

After that, I could not find anything else about him. As you can see above 2/3 social media sites that were found about Daniel had to do with school, which indicates that he is an under sharer. It is clear that through this all, I can see that Daniel is from Moose Jaw, he is French, he works with kids, he is a future teaching and is passionate about this all! His digital identity is positive and does not give misleading details. If I knew nothing about Daniel before cyber sleuthing him, I feel I would know him a lot more professionally now knowing all these things. I feel I do not know him personally through this, but his objective of social media may be for professional use only.

I found a picture of him and his cohort that he had in university, which I felt was the most personal thing I could find. I even happen to be in the photo. Can you find him?

All in all, I enjoyed this assignment and learned lots about my classmate! Let me know if you find anymore information about him that I missed out on!