Thoughts on privacy discussions

So this week in our seminar class, we took a look at privacy and how it applies to CS, and to do so, we engaged in the frowned upon activity of researching another person in class to see what we could find on them, and have them do the same to us to reveal how big our digital footprint is. To research my partner, I used the most basic research tools like public records, google, search.appstate.edu, etc. To no surprise, I found about as much as one would expect– what city they live(ed) in, some connection with where they went to school, stuff like that. My overall impression with the assignment was that while it did feel kind of nefarious researching somebody online, we were doing it for an assignment, and I did get some useful feedback about my own digital footprint.