Digital footprint

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A digital footprint symbol Footprints.png
A digital footprint symbol

Digital footprint or digital shadow refers to one's unique set of traceable digital activities, actions, contributions, and communications manifested on the Internet or digital devices. [1] [2] [3] [4] Digital footprints can be classified as either passive or active. The former is composed of a user's web-browsing activity and information stored as cookies. The latter is often released deliberately by a user to share information on websites or social media. [5] While the term usually applies to a person, a digital footprint can also refer to a business, organization or corporation. [6]

Contents

The use of a digital footprint has both positive and negative consequences. On one side, it is the subject of many privacy issues. [7] For example, without an individual's authorization, strangers can piece together information about that individual by only using search engines. Corporations are also able to produce customized ads based on browsing history. On the other hand, others can reap the benefits by profiting off their digital footprint as social media influencers. Furthermore, employers use a candidate's digital footprint for online vetting and assessing fit due to its reduced cost and accessibility.[ citation needed ] Between two equal candidates, a candidate with a positive digital footprint may have an advantage. As technology usage becomes more widespread, even children generate larger digital footprints with potential positive and negative consequences such as college admissions. Since it is hard not to have a digital footprint, it is in one's best interest to create a positive one.

Types of digital footprints

Passive digital footprints are a data trail that an individual involuntarily leaves online. [8] [9] They can be stored in various ways depending on the situation. A footprint may be stored in an online database as a "hit" in an online environment. The footprint may track the user's IP address, when it was created, where it came from, and the footprint later being analyzed. In an offline environment, administrators can access and view the machine's actions without seeing who performed them. Examples of passive digital footprints are apps that use geolocations, websites that download cookies onto your appliance, or browser history. Although passive digital footprints are inevitable, they can be lessened by deleting old accounts, using privacy settings (public or private accounts), and occasionally online searching yourself to see the information left behind. [10]

Active digital footprints are deliberate, as they are posted or shared information willingly. They can also be stored in a variety of ways depending on the situation. A digital footprint can be stored when a user logs into a site and makes a post or change; the registered name is connected to the edit in an online environment. Examples of active digital footprints include social media posts, video or image uploads, or changes to various websites. [9]

Privacy issues

Digital footprints are not a digital identity or passport, but the content and metadata collected impacts internet privacy, trust, security, digital reputation, and recommendation. As the digital world expands and integrates with more aspects of life, ownership and rights concerning data become increasingly important. Digital footprints are controversial in that privacy and openness compete. [11] Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, said in 1999 Get Over It when referring to privacy on the Internet. [12] The quote later became a commonly used phrase in discussing private data and what companies do with it. [13] Digital footprints are a privacy concern because they are a set of traceable actions, contributions, and ideas shared by users. It can be tracked and can allow internet users to learn about human actions. [14]

Interested parties use Internet footprints for several reasons; including cyber-vetting, [15] where interviewers could research applicants based on their online activities. Internet footprints are also used by law enforcement agencies to provide information unavailable otherwise due to a lack of probable cause. [16] Also, digital footprints are used by marketers to find what products a user is interested in or to inspire ones' interest in a particular product based on similar interests. [17]

Social networking systems may record the activities of individuals, with data becoming a life stream . Such social media usage and roaming services allow digital tracing data to include individual interests, social groups, behaviors, and location. Such data is gathered from sensors within devices and collected and analyzed without user awareness. [18] When many users choose to share personal information about themselves through social media platforms, including places they visited, timelines and their connections, they are unaware of the privacy setting choices and the security consequences associated with them. [19] Many social media sites, like Facebook, collect an extensive amount of information that can be used to piece together a user's personality. Information gathered from social media, such as the number of friends a user has, can predict whether or not the user has an introvert or extrovert personality. Moreover, a survey of SNS users revealed that 87% identified their work or education level, 84% identified their full date of birth, 78% identified their location, and 23% listed their phone numbers. [19]

While one's digital footprint may infer personal information, such as demographic traits, sexual orientation, race, religious and political views, personality, or intelligence [20] without individuals' knowledge, it also exposes individuals' private psychological spheres into the social sphere. [21] Lifelogging is an example of an indiscriminate collection of information concerning an individual's life and behavior. [22] There are actions to take to make a digital footprint challenging to track. [23] An example of the usage or interpretation of data trails is through Facebook-influenced creditworthiness ratings, [24] the judicial investigations around German social scientist Andrej Holm, [25] advertisement-junk mails by the American company OfficeMax [26] or the border incident of Canadian citizen Ellen Richardson. [27]

Impacts

Workforce

An increasing number of employers are evaluating applicants by their digital footprint through their interaction on social media due to its reduced cost and easy accessibility [28] during the hiring process. By using such resources, employers can gain more insight on candidates beyond their well-scripted interview responses and perfected resumes. [29] Candidates who display poor communication skills, use inappropriate language, or use drugs or alcohol are rated lower. [30] Conversely, a candidate with a professional or family-oriented social media presence receives higher ratings. [31] Employers also assess a candidate through their digital footprint to determine if a candidate is a good cultural fit [32] for their organization. [33] Suppose a candidate upholds an organization's values or shows existing passion for its mission. In that case, the candidate is more likely to integrate within the organization and could accomplish more than the average person. Although these assessments are known not to be accurate predictors of performance or turnover rates, [34] employers still use digital footprints to evaluate their applicants. Thus, job seekers prefer to create a social media presence that would be viewed positively from a professional point of view.

In some professions, maintaining a digital footprint is essential. People will search the internet for specific doctors and their reviews. Half of the search results for a particular physician link to third-party rating websites. [35] For this reason, prospective patients may unknowingly choose their physicians based on their digital footprint in addition to online reviews. Furthermore, a generation relies on social media for livelihood as influencers by using their digital footprint. These influencers have dedicated fan bases that may be eager to follow recommendations. As a result, marketers pay influencers to promote their products among their followers, since this medium may yield better returns than traditional advertising. [36] [37] Consequently, one's career may be reliant on their digital footprint.

Children

Children's digital footprint may traverse the internet beyond the intended audiences Automotive Social Media Marketing.jpg
Children's digital footprint may traverse the internet beyond the intended audiences

Generation Alpha will not be the first generation born into the internet world. As such, a child's digital footprint is becoming more significant than ever before and their consequences may be unclear. As a result of parenting enthusiasm, an increasing amount of parents will create social media accounts for their children at a young age, sometimes even before they are born. [38] Parents may post up to 13,000 photos of a child on social media in their celebratory state before their teen years of everyday life or birthday celebrations. [39] Furthermore, these children are predicted to post 70,000 times online on their own by 18. [39] The advent of posting on social media creates many opportunities to gather data from minors. Since an identity's basic components contain a name, birth date, and address, these children are susceptible to identity theft. [40] While parents may assume that privacy settings may prevent children's photos and data from being exposed, they also have to trust that their followers will not be compromised. Outsiders may take the images to pose as these children's parents or post the content publicly. [41] For example, during the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal, friends of friends leaked data to data miners. Due to the child's presence on social media, their privacy may be at risk.

Teenagers

Some professionals argue that young people entering the workforce should consider the effect of their digital footprint on their marketability and professionalism. [42] Having a digital footprint may be very good for students, as college admissions staff and potential employers may decide to research into prospective student's and employee's online profiles, leading to an enormous impact on the students' futures. [42] Teens will be set up for more success if they consider the kind of impact they are making and how it can affect their future. Instead, someone who acts apathetic towards the impression they are making online will struggle if they one day choose to attend college or enter into the workforce. [43] Teens who plan to receive a higher education will have their digital footprint reviewed and assessed as a part of the application process. [44] Besides, if the teens that have the intention of receiving a higher education are planning to do so with financial help and scholarships, then they need to consider that their digital footprint will be evaluated in the application process to get scholarships. [45]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Privacy</span> Seclusion from unwanted attention

Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively.

Internet privacy involves the right or mandate of personal privacy concerning the storage, re-purposing, provision to third parties, and display of information pertaining to oneself via the Internet. Internet privacy is a subset of data privacy. Privacy concerns have been articulated from the beginnings of large-scale computer sharing and especially relate to mass surveillance.

A digital identity is data stored on computer systems relating to an individual, organization, application, or device. For individuals, it involves the collection of personal data that is essential for facilitating automated access to digital services, confirming one's identity on the internet, and allowing digital systems to manage interactions between different parties. It is a component of a person's social identity in the digital realm, often referred to as their online identity.

Internet identity (IID), also online identity, online personality, online persona or internet persona, is a social identity that an Internet user establishes in online communities and websites. It may also be an actively constructed presentation of oneself. Although some people choose to use their real names online, some Internet users prefer to be anonymous, identifying themselves by means of pseudonyms, which reveal varying amounts of personally identifiable information. An online identity may even be determined by a user's relationship to a certain social group they are a part of online. Some can be deceptive about their identity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social networking service</span> Online platform that facilitates the building of relations

A social networking service (SNS), or social networking site, is a type of online social media platform which people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career content, interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social media</span> Virtual online communities

Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content amongst virtual communities and networks. Common features include:

Online identity management (OIM), also known as online image management, online personal branding, or personal reputation management (PRM), is a set of methods for generating a distinguished web presence of a person on the Internet. Online identity management also refers to identity exposure and identity disclosure, and has particularly developed in the management on online identity in social network services or online dating services.

Social network advertising, also known as social media targeting, is a group of terms used to describe forms of online advertising and digital marketing that focus on social networking services. A significant aspect of this type of advertising is that advertisers can take advantage of users' demographic information, psychographics, and other data points to target their ads.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital citizen</span> Person using IT to engage in society, politics, and government

The term digital citizen is used with different meanings. According to the definition provided by Karen Mossberger, one of the authors of Digital Citizenship: The Internet, Society, and Participation, digital citizens are "those who use the internet regularly and effectively." In this sense, a digital citizen is a person using information technology (IT) in order to engage in society, politics, and government.

Online vetting, also known as cyber-vetting is used by potential employers and other acquaintances to vet people's online presence or "internet reputation" ("netrep") on search engines such as Google and Yahoo, and social networking services such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Employers may check profiles, posts, and photographs for indications that the candidate is unsuitable for a certain job or position.

The social data revolution is the shift in human communication patterns towards increased personal information sharing and its related implications, made possible by the rise of social networks in the early 2000s. This phenomenon has resulted in the accumulation of unprecedented amounts of public data.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital privacy</span>

Digital privacy is often used in contexts that promote advocacy on behalf of individual and consumer privacy rights in e-services and is typically used in opposition to the business practices of many e-marketers, businesses, and companies to collect and use such information and data. Digital privacy, a crucial aspect of modern online interactions and services, can be defined under three sub-related categories: information privacy, communication privacy, and individual privacy.

Since the arrival of early social networking sites in the early 2000s, online social networking platforms have expanded exponentially, with the biggest names in social media in the mid-2010s being Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. The massive influx of personal information that has become available online and stored in the cloud has put user privacy at the forefront of discussion regarding the database's ability to safely store such personal information. The extent to which users and social media platform administrators can access user profiles has become a new topic of ethical consideration, and the legality, awareness, and boundaries of subsequent privacy violations are critical concerns in advance of the technological age.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">User profile</span> Data about an individual user

A user profile is a collection of settings and information associated with a user. It contains critical information that is used to identify an individual, such as their name, age, portrait photograph and individual characteristics such as knowledge or expertise. User profiles are most commonly present on social media websites such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn; and serve as voluntary digital identity of an individual, highlighting their key features and traits. In personal computing and operating systems, user profiles serve to categorise files, settings, and documents by individual user environments, known as ‘accounts’, allowing the operating system to be more friendly and catered to the user. Physical user profiles serve as identity documents such as passports, driving licenses and legal documents that are used to identify an individual under the legal system.

Sharenting is a portmanteau of "sharing" and "parenting" describing the practice of parents publicizing a large amount of potentially sensitive content about their children on internet platforms. While the term was coined as recently as 2010, sharenting has become an international phenomenon with widespread presence in the United States, Spain, France, and the United Kingdom. As such, sharenting has also ignited disagreement as a controversial application of social media. Detractors find that it violates child privacy and hurts a parent-child relationship. Proponents frame the practice as a natural expression of parental pride in their children and argue that critics take sharenting-related posts out of context.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dataveillance</span> Monitoring and collecting online data and metadata

Dataveillance is the practice of monitoring and collecting online data as well as metadata. The word is a portmanteau of data and surveillance. Dataveillance is concerned with the continuous monitoring of users' communications and actions across various platforms. For instance, dataveillance refers to the monitoring of data resulting from credit card transactions, GPS coordinates, emails, social networks, etc. Using digital media often leaves traces of data and creates a digital footprint of our activity. Unlike sousveillance, this type of surveillance is not often known and happens discreetly. Dataveillance may involve the surveillance of groups of individuals. There exist three types of dataveillance: personal dataveillance, mass dataveillance, and facilitative mechanisms.

Social profiling is the process of constructing a social media user's profile using his or her social data. In general, profiling refers to the data science process of generating a person's profile with computerized algorithms and technology. There are various platforms for sharing this information with the proliferation of growing popular social networks, including but not limited to LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook and Twitter.

Privacy settings are "the part of a social networking website, internet browser, piece of software, etc. that allows you to control who sees information about you". With the growing prevalence of social networking services, opportunities for privacy exposures also grow. Privacy settings allow a person to control what information is shared on these platforms.

The advent of social networking services has led to many issues spanning from misinformation and disinformation to privacy concerns related to public and private personal data.

Meta Platforms Inc., or Meta for short, has faced a number of privacy concerns. These stem partly from the company's revenue model that involves selling information collected about its users for many things including advertisement targeting. Meta Platforms Inc. has also been a part of many data breaches that have occurred within the company. These issues and others are further described including user data concerns, vulnerabilities in the company's platform, investigations by pressure groups and government agencies, and even issues with students. In addition, employers and other organizations/individuals have been known to use Meta Platforms Inc. for their own purposes. As a result, individuals’ identities and private information have sometimes been compromised without their permission. In response to these growing privacy concerns, some pressure groups and government agencies have increasingly asserted the users’ right to privacy and to be able to control their personal data.

References

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