Computer Science · Ch 11 — Societal Impact
Digital Footprints
Digital Footprints
Every action we perform online — searching for information, buying a ticket, replying to an email, checking a live score — leaves a trace. The trail of data that reflects our online activities is called our digital footprint, and understanding it is the first step towards behaving safely on the Internet.
What a digital footprint is
Whenever we surf the Internet from a smartphone, tablet or computer, a record of what we did is generated. Crucially, this footprint can be created and used with or without our knowledge. It is made up of:
- the websites we visit,
- the emails we send,
- any information we submit online (forms, sign-ups, posts), and
- device-side details captured alongside — the computer's IP address, our location, and other device-specific information.
This accumulated data is valuable: it can be used for targeted advertisement, but it can equally be misused or exploited. Being aware of the trail we leave should make us cautious about what we write, upload, download — or even simply browse — online.
Two kinds of digital footprints
The book divides footprints by whether the data was left on purpose:
| Kind | How it is created | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Active digital footprint | Data we intentionally submit online | Emails we write; responses or posts we make on websites and mobile apps |
| Passive digital footprint | Data trail left unintentionally, generated automatically | Data created when we visit a website, use a mobile app, or browse the Internet |
Figure 11.1 illustrates the kinds of web applications — social networks, mail, messaging, media apps — whose use produces these footprints.
The footprint grows, and it is not in our control
Everyone connected to the Internet may have a digital footprint, and the more we use the Internet, the larger the trail grows. Where does all this data sit?
- In the browser: examining the browser settings shows how it stores browsing history, cookies, saved passwords, auto-fill entries and many other kinds of data.
- On remote servers: beyond the browser, most of our footprint is stored on the servers that host the applications we use. We generally have no access to remove or erase that data, and no control over how it will be used.
Why deletion does not really delete
Once a data trail has been generated, deleting our activity later does not guarantee that the record disappears. The digital footprints remain, and there is no guarantee they will ever be fully eliminated from the Internet. This permanence is the core lesson of the section: we must be cautious before acting online, because we cannot reliably clean up afterwards.
The footprint identifies us
All our online activity leaves a data trace both on the Internet and on the computing device we used. That trace can be used to identify:
- the user who performed the activity,
- his or her location, …
Drawn by us to help you understand the concept clearly, and verified to make sure it's accurate. For exams, practice from your textbook's own diagram.
This figure makes the idea of a digital footprint literal: it draws an actual footprint — the silhouette of a left foot, sole and five toes — but builds the entire shape out of dozens of small circular icons of well-known web and social applications, set against a white background.
Inside the sole, the larger circles are the apps most of us use every day: Facebook (the blue lowercase f), Pinterest (the red P), WhatsApp (the green phone inside a speech bubble), LinkedIn ("in"), the Twitter bird, the Wikipedia globe, the Google Play triangle, the Gmail envelope, the Skype S, the YouTube play button, the Apple App Store, Google+ and browser-style icons like Chrome. The five toes are smaller clusters of the same kinds of circular app icons, shrinking in size toward the little toe. There are no labels or axes — the app logos themselves are the content. …