Digital Footprint of the Future: Emerging Trends and How to Protect Your Privacy
Our online lives leave a digital footprint. Each "footprint" -- each piece of data associated with us – can be tracked and analyzed. Everything we do online – every post we make, every website we visit, every email we send – contributes to our digital footprint. That's just the tip of the iceberg, too! Just about anything we do online contributes to a unique digital footprint that will be associated specifically with us.
Given this context, the digital footprint has implications for privacy protection. There are some steps we can take to minimize our digital footprint, and therefore the risk of our personal "content" (identity) being hacked by unscrupulous johns. The digital footprint also has significance when it comes to points of presence. Focus on how our digital footprint may affect privacy, or online "Brand YOU". At some point in time, identity theft may be the outcome of this whole privacy "thing." Establishing and managing our digital footprint becomes increasingly important as trends in technology collection (to build profiles of individuals that we can see begin to emerge with AI, big data, and IoT).
Understanding Your Digital Footprint
A digital footprint is the unique trail of data that people create when they interact with the internet. There are two types of digital footprints: active and passive. Active footprints are created when someone deliberately gives information. This category includes an astonishing array of data: posts on social media, blog comments, messages in chat rooms, online purchases, the list goes on and on. Passive footprints, on the other hand, are created without user intervention. Internet tracking technologies, like cookies, latch onto pieces of relevant online data and continuously transmit them to whoever's paying for it.
Not being aware of one's digital footprints could seriously compromise their privacy. Whether people know it or not, most of the time they're on the Internet, they're shedding a near-constant stream of personal data. This data is intercepted by both legitimate companies (for things like targeted advertising) and, in some cases, hackers (for more nefarious purposes like identity fraud). As a result, users should be vigilant about their footprints to keep their sensitive data safe.
Some people may actively manage both of their data footprints for other, potentially darker reasons. A potential employer, inquisitive college administrator, snoopy romantic partner, or anyone with an inherent motivation, really, can easily search a person online to see who they're really dealing with, drastically affecting the searcher's perception of the interviewee. All things considered, it would be wise for these subjects to fully understand and deliberately manage the effects of their data footprints.
Emerging Technology Trends Impacting Digital Footprints
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the power to sort, manage, and analyze your data. Do you like the sound of that? For a significant chunk of your marketing strategy, AI can help to relay the most suitable content directly to your audience. But do you know what this does for the privacy concerned among us? It completely tears it up.
Let me run this a slightly different way. Do you know how much AI knows about you? Data is consistently collected every day from social media, shopping, entertainment, and IoT (effectively, just by having your phone turned on). The phrase, "Where you are right now," opens up an extensive map. The "who's" and "what's" of your life become sharply illuminated. This also describes the typical everyday online connected crowd—the "Joe Blogs" of this world. Now, some basic filtering will substantially narrow down the eight-plus billion population of this world. This is obviously not a comforting thought.
Reducing this situation to its finest definition, it's pure simple SMP (sieve-, mop-, and-pop) analytics. This is really just a big sieve that filters out data that is not relevant to the target. What is left is the gold or your details. For security, you have the following countermeasures in place:
Basic signature-based security defenses. Inject information that blurs the target. IoT-enabled devices "[skylum_software]" before disclosure. Blur information in the same way as Prime number encryption. Use product descriptions and/or code names in a similar way to deliver beacons. Minimize profiles. Build active rather than passive relationships. Your company's data protection and privacy settings need to be set up for the worst VUCA environment. The marketing department and incoming teams will sort the rest out for themselves. But "you" should be tuned toward a primary mission of defining the best team you want around your IT environment.
The Importance of Privacy Protection
Having a big digital footprint comes with some serious risks—mainly, identity theft due to personal data breaches. As we engage on a platform, we leave behind private information about ourselves. This can include anything from a name and address to credit card and Social Security numbers. This is all information that could be used, for example, by someone pretending to be you so they could make a purchase in your name, depleting your checking account.
Elsewhere, someone else might use your information in a company data hack. Be smart about your cybersecurity so you do your part to protect your own personal data from being stolen. Having a strong, unique password can help, as can enabling two-factor authentication. Be sure to also update software on a regular basis and only use the "official" version of applications. Avoid sharing too much about yourself online when possible. If you're on public Wi-Fi (including your own Wi-Fi network at home if it is unsecured), use a virtual private network to try to protect your activity from data thieves on the same network.
Strategies for Personal Data Management
In today's digital world, it is important that you also curate your online presence with similar diligence. Regularly audit your social media profiles and other online services — remove unnecessary information, get rid of legacy accounts, and ensure you are using privacy settings in a way that restricts who can see what you post online. It's just a part of due diligence these days.
At the same time, consider using other software tools and adopting best practices to protect your digital presence in different capacities:
-Use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to be less visible to prying eyes — a good VPN will encrypt your internet traffic so governments, your Internet Service Provider, or even the applications you use have a hard time keeping track of where you visited online.
-Use a Password Manager, which can securely create and keep track of complex password strings across all of your accounts. This dramatically reduces the likelihood that anyone could guess your password based on your personal history with data publicly available online.
-Get in the habit of using secure sites and not clicking on shady ones that are prone to malware. Look at the address bar of this article: it begins with "https://" (not "http://").
-Be mindful about what you share on social media; overlook the obvious, and always remember that everything you share has a second hidden agenda — all of your information is also a data point for someone else; everything you share has data points (like your geolocation) that you might not even be aware of; certain details can also be exploited by people from your past (that you might not even know personally) when you share too much. Just know when you've shared enough.
The Future of Digital Footprints and Privacy
Digital footprints are already a nuanced business. They are formed by every interaction we have on the internet. Every social media interaction, each item we buy—or even don't buy—online, informs a vast aggregate of data that forms a picture of who we are. This picture will become unimaginably high-res in the future, and I am sure AI will have a part to play in that. It is scary to think how exposed we will all be when the time comes; privacy is really becoming understated in the Useful User Information market.
One solution to the problem? Get a good digital footprint. And by 'good,' I mean really, really boring. Make your Metadata management practices proactive instead of reactive—audit yourself regularly and understand what consequence your digital actions might have. Use a VPN and some sort of encrypted-texting platform if you are paranoid about what you are saying to your mates being leaked to god-knows-which advertising company. Understand your rights.
Understanding our "digital footprints" has become a part of the basics of maintaining any privacy today. Defined on Wikipedia as "traces left by someone's activity in a digital environment," these include all the things and ways that we are being tracked—most basically by our interactions on social media, any shopping we've done recently, and the searches we have performed on Google or any other website we have visited. It is important for each person to know all the nuances beyond those basics that may have just changed what someone out there knows about you that you probably haven't—until now—wanted them to know!
I'm also studying the rapid burst of change in ways of rolling out the currently hottest—often state-of-the-art—technology. These new gadgets work by also introducing upgrades to the ways they want/need them to work—often now, much more personally—i.e., by tracking our individualized data and re-introducing/re-positioning our wants/needs—effectively, for their products. This appears to be potentially helpful for humankind, but what I'm wondering/worrying about are some of the privacy-infringing methods they are preparing their new products for, today.