a social comment on the human condition: how people such as myself come up online

I was told in my Islamic Arts class last week that the ancient Turks were wonderful scribes- noting every transaction and little things that went on in their society. I was amazed by this, especially because how similar it really is to today with something like the internet- recording not only everything you do, but even down to suggesting what else you might enjoy. As cool as it is, it's worrisome to some people like me. I find it lovely that my every move can be traceable, but I would like that to be a private thing rather public, as most of the internet unfortunately is today. Is there any way to be able to clean up some of these things on your own?

When trying to research my phone number, address, and name, for the most part, not much came up. To my liking, looking up myself on Spokeo, Intellus, etc., I didn't come up. When I researched my address too, nothing came up thankfully, and neither did anything about my family, except actual information about the house. It's surreal to see your house on Google Maps, but it also makes you realise how far we've come in terms of technology, and it's truly an achievement in general how we can trace and scribe so much, regardless of how creepy. If you Google Image search my name, some of my high school achievements come up (as does my old hair- so unkept and a poor colour choice). Thankfully a lot of my stuff is private, also since I don't expose much on social media etc, but the game changed when I researched all of my e-mails.

When looking up my e-mail addresses on Spokeo, a lot of my social media and pictures came up. For the most part, this was fine, since I tried as much as possible to separate e-mails: one being for social media accounts, and one for professionalism. Despite that separation, there was a lot of affiliation with my professional account with social media, which surprised me. It makes me want to reconsider the e-mails I use for accounts, and organise myself better. One thing I found interesting nonetheless was when searching my e-mails, an old drawing I did came up. It was a self portrait of me holding a hat over my head, concealing my face completely. Clever.