Don’t bother looking over your shoulder; it would do you no good. This is the kind of stalking that a can of mace cannot protect you from. It’s known as “Googling”.

Trey McLeskey can find out information on just about anyone by using only two websites: Google and Facebook. The recent trend of online activity is quickly eliminating any and all privacy. Soon, people like Trey will be able to know everything about you with a few strokes of the keyboard.



Currently a student at New York University, Trey has turned his attention to the Internet, and particularly to its ramifications for personal privacy. He has been compiling data for over a year on random people in the United States, all pulled from public websites accessible through Facebook and Google. Trey hopes that this data will be put to use in his creation of a “Psychological Mini-Matrix”, as he calls it.

This creation is merely a computer simulation, much like The Sims line of games from Maxis. However, rather than defining personality through some arbitrary scale of a few programmable traits, Trey’s program will analyze dozens of terabytes of information all gleaned from the World Wide Web.

“Each individual in this simulation is modeled off of real world individuals,” Trey explains. “Their personality is defined by the available data online, and the program extrapolates from that.” The ultimate goal of this research is to unlock the mysteries of personality. This could have potentially soul-crushing consequences.

“Many people still believe that humans are somehow special,” explains Abhinav Rohatgi, a pre-med student assisting Trey with his experiment. “They feel a person is defined by some indefinable essence, a conscience or a soul. This project is testing these very claims.”

The endeavor is certainly an ambitious one, likely to take several more years before any results are published. However, the team feels confident that with decreasing privacy online, their jobs will only get easier.