Egosurfing is the practice of researching yourself with the same tools an investigator would use on a target: search engines, people-search sites, breach checkers, image search, and social platforms. The goal is to see your own digital footprint from the outside — what a stranger, employer, or adversary could assemble about you from public sources.
It is the natural starting point for personal privacy work. By finding what is exposed — an old address on a data-broker site, a photo that reveals your location, an email in a breach — you learn what to remove, lock down, or monitor. Done regularly, egosurfing turns privacy from a guess into a measurable exercise.