I’ve always had a keen interest in how much information about me is floating around the World Wide Web.
Ever since I learned the basic about coding and built my own MySpace page, I’ve left a pretty prominent digital footprint that more than likely includes a ton of publicly available information. Of course, I know about most of my personal and professional milestones. But I’ve always been curious about the data everyone with an internet connection can look up that paints a full picture of who I am, what I do and what I’m into.
I went from constantly thinking about that digital deep dive to putting it into action by asking ChatGPT to find every piece of information that could exist about me across the World Wide Web.
Not only did it bring up an assortment of details I already know about myself, but it also brought up things I’d forgotten about my professional life, inferred a slew of observations about me and even found someone with the same name as me.
A prompt meant for probing my own internet identity
I generated this prompt with ChatGPT’s assistance to make sure it produced the most comprehensive results possible once I tasked it with analyzing my digital footprint:
I want you to investigate what the public internet knows about me.
My name is Elton Jones. I am a journalist who writes about AI and video games, and I am associated with Tom's Guide.
Using publicly available information on the internet, find as much information about me as you reasonably can. Look across news articles, websites, social media profiles, professional pages, public databases, interviews, forums, archived pages, and other publicly accessible sources.
Organize your findings into these categories:
1. Who I am — basic biographical and professional information.
2. My work — jobs, companies, projects, articles, websites, or other professional activity.
3. My online presence — social accounts, profiles, websites, and other pages that appear to belong to me.
4. My interests — topics, hobbies, communities, or activities associated with me.
5. Public history — notable events, articles, interviews, appearances, or other publicly documented activity.
6. What you can infer — reasonable conclusions about my interests, career, or online activity based only on the evidence you found. Clearly label these as inferences rather than facts.
7. Potentially sensitive information — identify categories of personal information that appear to be publicly exposed, but do not reproduce private details such as home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, passwords, financial information, or other highly sensitive personal data.
8. Unexpected discoveries — anything particularly surprising or that I might not realize is publicly associated with me.
For every significant finding, provide the source and explain how confident you are that it actually refers to me rather than someone with a similar name.
Do not assume that two people are the same person simply because their names match. Cross-reference details such as occupation, location, employer, usernames, photographs, and other identifiers before connecting information.
At the end, give me a “What the internet knows about me” summary containing:
- 5 things that are strongly established
- 5 things that are probable but less certain
- 5 things I should consider removing, changing, or making less publicly accessible
Focus on information that is genuinely discoverable through public web searches rather than trying to guess private information.
The known, forgotten and surprising details ChatGPT uncovered about me
ChatGPT did everything it could to search the public domain using a combination of my full name, bylines, previous/current employers, older job roles, publications I’ve written for, social media usernames, educational record and clues to my main location.
The chatbot referenced a bunch of information about myself that I’m already privy to. The fully summarized take it gave me about me is as follows: The public record strongly supports that Elton Jones is a New York–area technology and gaming journalist who currently writes about AI for Tom's Guide and previously spent years covering video games and geek culture for outlets including ONE37pm, Heavy, Complex, TechRadar, Okayplayer/OkayplayerGO, SVG, and The Christian Post.
While it brought up additional information about my career and hobbies/interests, ChatGPT also mentioned more interesting bits of info that kickstarted my memory. I know my journalism career reaches back to 2010, but I totally forgot I won a contest that allowed me to write a guest article for GamesRadar. The chatbot recognized it as a “documented origin story” for my career as a writer. I was also caught off guard when it pointed to a blog I had written around that same time about a disco tribute band my father was once a part of (we all have to start our writing careers somewhere, am I right?).
Imagine my shock and awe when ChatGPT listed a pretty funny detail that made me think it found a version of me hailing from another universe. It mentioned someone by the name of “Elton E. Jones,” who happens to be a video game voice actor with an official IMDb page.
Reading those details made me say to myself, “So this would probably have been my life if I actually pursued a career in video games that put me in the recording booth…” It’s fun to know that there are people out there with my same name who are doing something completely different with their career.
How this ChatGPT self-investigation compares to Googling myself
I've tried looking myself up just by Googling my name before and was treated to a page full of links to an obituary, a blog page for a tribute band called "Elton Jones and The Jets" and the actual Elton John as the top result (since I'm so sure that Google thought I made a spelling mistake and wanted to actually look him up instead).
ChatGPT's thorough internet investigation into me was more targeted toward identity resolution by zeroing in on Elton Jones, the journalist. Instead of giving me a mixture of results from unrelated individuals and other entities who just happen to have my same name, the chatbot actively looked for me and rejected questionable matches.
Alongside that, ChatGPT ignored obvious search results and relied on multiple searches across a wealth of sources. Plus, it cross-referenced all the information it could find about me, built a timeline of my career, looked for strong connections between my social media profiles & my professional identity and unearthed old/archived material that would take a lot longer to find through a Google search.
Google's raw search results still come in handy from time to time, but I got way more than I bargained for from ChatGPT's digital researcher-assisted look into everything the internet has on me.
The takeaway
ChatGPT lifted all the data it could about me by simply looking at all the journalism-related information Google had on me.
It stated that my public footprint is substantial and surprisingly coherent thanks to the throughline that follows the star of my career up until now.
And on the topic of what my biggest online privacy concern could be, here’s what ChatGPT had to say: The biggest privacy concern isn't some hidden scandal or mysterious database entry. It's actually the sheer accumulation of information across 15+ years: old social posts, historical biographies, professional databases, location references, archived articles, and your newer first-person AI experiments.
Thankfully, I’m not too worried about the articles I’ve written about my MCU fandom and love for pizza exposing too much about my private life. And I have to thank ChatGPT for painting a full picture of me with all the information it searched for, giving me some warm reminders about the beginning of my writing career and showing me who I could have been in an alternate universe.
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