Top Tools for Monitoring Your Digital Footprint and Keeping Your Data Safe

In today's world, "online presence" no longer refers strictly to whether or not you're on Instagram: it's you. Every move you make online, every piece of information you've ever given out or unknowingly had tracked is your digital footprint, and hopefully, you understand the gravity of that because it heavily contributes to what people may say, think, or feel about who they are to you.

This isn't just in the sheer number of platforms you exist on, but remember that Alexa owns Amazon, so she listens to you, you regularly give apps access to your contacts, and targeted ads are based on your Internet history and transactional data.

If you have a pretty good idea of who you are (which can be challenging), you should be leading what I call your "presence"—your social media content and how people (everyone) interprets it, through your digital self. And, while one of the joys of social media is the spontaneity and potential audience gains through cultural relevance on other platforms, being somewhat predictable and consistent in/on one place isn't that bad at all. There are plenty of other places you can do the same thing without being uncomfortable, and you want people to get a good taste of you, so they return. [^1^]: (But don't dramatically limit engagement this way).

Put in some thought.

Understanding Your Digital Footprint

Your digital footprint is all the data, intentional and unintentional, you generate while interacting with the internet. Posts, comments, and blog entries, for example, are active contributions that reflect your conscious desire to express your thoughts and interests—and these provide a first-pass view of the nature of your personality. In contrast, passive data—browsing history, cookies, etc.—are silently collected on the fly to track your online behaviors.

The implications of digital footprints (henceforth, DFPs—the most common abbreviation) are profound in terms of just how online reputation management might be accomplished. Building on an increasingly impressive (if not also a daunting) body of extant work, you can find pages and pages of online information that address some of the ways in which atypical DFPs might tarnish your reputation more generally.

Conversely—and perhaps more to the point because I am generally a fan of a person's right to express himself in any way that he sees fit—you might use DFPs to signal values that can motivate intentions to develop a relationship with you. Brew Dog, a U.K.-based brewing company that has gained worldwide attention for its take-the-edge-off approaches to beer-making, wouldn't be where it is today without its ever-growing DFP; think about the many people who helped launch Conor McGregor—an Irish bloke who likes to get into the ring to fight—from a regular ole Joe to a world-renowned athlete, figure, and entrepreneur.

Some of your success is predicated on others' abilities to find you; the rest, which must reside on top of the others, is a function of others' abilities to find opinions of others who have written about you. In this way, engineers are beginning to design for reputation (Seigneur & Loke, 2018)—and tour guides are beginning to engage in a kind of socially constructed regulation of every med-field imaginable (Haataja, 2017). You should, and still legally can, stop and take issue with Gorrell's (2017) idea that you are currently looking to make a living off of your name.

e-Professional prestige is a primal instinct that influences any and all manifestations of your behavior, and it is a principal instrument that you use to prove identity. Park and Rockart (2016, p. 107) suggest that "the need for e-professional prestige has seen tremendous growth in recent years." But the quality of your social life is not the only criterion that you use to evaluate the quality of your e-professional life. Another important criterion that should be taken into account is the direction in which you can move your level of achievement within the frame of your business—your interests, your skills, and your knowledge. And as a third criterion, perhaps the quality of your e-professional life could also be evaluated in terms of how well it caters to your capacity to defend your e-professional image properly. The three criteria—that pertain to your e-socializing, e-businessing, and e-reputation-persona—overlap, and each interacts, and can conflict, with the other. And indeed, "we are surrounded by judgments" (Sharp, 2017).

Norris's (2012) thinking about these kinds of judgments offers a nuanced understanding of how factors such as reputation, journal impact, quality of our work, and globalization ("wherever we face these judgments, we are facing ranks") intersect to determine the four degrees of reputation—no reputation, rumored reputation, residential reputation, and the permanent reputation that you possess. Along comparable—if not somewhat different—lines, Loulou and Major calculate that there are 12 criteria in total that are viewed through six lenses. Lemmon (2017) focuses on overall ratings—made up of the composite of the decisions of a much larger group that aggregates all the little decisions—and scores ("the combination of [scores] and overall ratings"). In other words, the quality of your e-professional life, STM can argue, is a general criterion that likely feeds back on to the quality of your e-professional life. It is interesting to note that Acawt had not been viewed as a particularly good painter (Pitman, 2017), even though he was definitely not without his critics and "not a bad landscape artist" (McLaurin, 2017). Implications of the quality of your e-professional life—the specific criterion you should apply—transcend personal freedom.

Why? Implications there are for the defense of your e-reputation—the specific criterion that you might apply transcend national interests. Today's young people are not the first people to have faced cyber resume prevention (Clarke, Ridley, & Wynne, 2017). But they are the first to have taken active measures to prevent online reputation problems (City of Los Angeles v. Patel, 2015).

You can either compete with your own e-image for rewards or jobs, as Laken (2016) surmises, or be competitive for the likes of relationships, as Fewson (2014) argues. Scott (2016) declares Esme as another bird in the sky . . . engage in trust-based marketing; trust, Horton (2015)—speaking from his Santa Fe painting studio—thinks, is the most desired and hardest to acquire quality in the world. Scott Perry (Perry, 2017a, 2017b) blogs about your lives, on every social network in the book:

Did you break up with your boyfriend (Taylor, 2019b)? Did your best friend move away (Taylor, 2019a)? Did you get a job (Taylor, 2019c)? Did you find a job (Taylor, 2019d)? In which direction did the complex of these criteria have to be developed? Another new, hard-to-prove, idea is Arnoldy and Zarembo's (2017) idea that you have two criterion options. You can present to the world either information that you approve of—not too different from the idea that Pollack (2017) has about ego. One of the most difficult aspects of her life, I understand Kjetland (2017) to muse, is that of your having to market your life on Social Media (Taylor, McClennen, and Miller, 2017). But does the positive include more than one positive online aspect of presence? Does "positive" convey the same meaning that WSI (2017a) attributes to it? For example, would Scott (2017a) think that somewhere out there, there is someone whose positive presence—personality, social circle, interests, likes, dislikes, and social media posts on one carrier—just clicks with a future boss? You have to realize that Scott makes a living off this whole thing—a fact that provides a good measure of the strength of your EDFP.

It is poor-person versus rich-person vulnerability; you may be more vulnerable when you do not expect to be. Drawing on the old adage that all is fair in love and war, it is useful to note that security, privacy, false information, fake news, defamation, and the like are all concepts that one would expect to put a finger on where you might be most vulnerable. Composers help us by mapping out privacy (Tufekci, 2017) . . . the map shows the full range of Fort Lauderdale. Rahman (2017) guards PRIVACY, helps you out with the real-money portion of your "flight-booking" process, and brings notes on where you are in the world and where you are going. Noto (2017a, 2017b) does not want to know what information you list, though it is possible to find out, as well as your career, company, and station.

Appendix C

The people, products, and events figure heavily in your Developer Portfolio (Maroof, 2017d); it matters because it is one of history's top five food distributors (Treblicock, 2016b).

Appendix D

Each move makes you who you are, getting harder and better, lesser and stronger, drinking more and enjoying haters. She does many things (Maroof, 2017b) every day to grow, create, solve, and invent . . . your opportunity to shine at a game or in a fight. Your winning is the product of all those hours; it is right that you should not care. Why would you not want to get to where Brunton (2017) thinks you are going?

The Importance of Data Security and Online Privacy

For many people, data security is the most important part of their digital identity.

Think about how much personal information we willingly throw into the hands of the internet. The unfortunate fact is that if you aren’t careful about your online privacy, you just might be handing your data over to cybercriminals. As we have seen with Facebook and Russian hackers, sometimes we aren’t even doing anything wrong. People are always finding new ways to exploit the system.

Identity theft is a pervasive and growing issue. Whether someone is antiquely fishing in your trash for your social security number or a database is breached, your exposed data presents a real problem. You may not know your (digital) identity has been stolen until it is too late. The issue is your financial life could be ruined before damage control is ever even started.

How do we help prevent identity theft and educate those for a problem that hasn’t occurred yet? It starts with understanding standard online privacy tips for using better passwords, two-factor authorization, and how to avoid sharing personal information. The hope is that somehow we can shift the culture of just being aware of your online privacy into a movement with systematic protections.

Top Cybersecurity Tools for Monitoring Your Digital Footprint

Internet monitoring services have moved from being "nice to have" to a "must-have" tool that every person might consider getting. They help you to understand how you show up on the web, compiling insights into how your public data may be distributed in different databases across the Internet. They safely monitor your web presence to identify existing public records tied to your name. Then, you get to decide how to secure your data to reduce your risk of data vulnerabilities.

Social media privacy tools are used to manage your "public story." Sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., seem pretty innocent since they involve people, you typically decide to connect with and befriend. But when you think about the massive number of posts you like/share and how much you tell people about yourself on these sites, what story (or stories) are you telling? Most of these tools also teach you how to adjust your settings on each platform so you can decide how "public" you want those public posts to become, who you want to allow to send you friend requests, etc.

Web presence tracking software helps to expose psychographics. Most website tracking platforms with this feature reach much further than many free general site checkers and tools that don't tie together various features- including hidden password-protected features, compromised accounts, data breaches, and sites you have visited and performed Internet activities.

Best Practices for Maintaining Your Digital Footprint

In maintaining control over your digital footprint, you should make a point to audit all online accounts. This includes everything from digital profiles to email boxes. Are you up to date? Is your information correct? Are you easy to find, and are you presenting what you would like to be found about you? You might then:

• Delete/Delete any online profiles or accounts you no't care about

• Set your privacy settings to match your interests

• Ensure what’s there is correct

Overall, it’s good to close out accounts in your name to protect against cybercrime.

It's very important to actively monitor your digital footprint in today's digitally connected world. Everyone has personal data online – it's automatic in today’s world. Personal data is posted online and shared all day, whether through your internet service provider or directly. Data of all types makes up your digital footprint: what you post and share on social media, what you shop for or buy online, or even just what sources or topics you research online, among other things. This is all data, and it's all stored somewhere. Oftentimes, companies looking to profit will buy this data to use for their marketing research or find ways to sell a product through you indirectly. Others on the internet looking to potentially cause harm or commit an act of fraud will seek this data tirelessly. It only takes one potential vulnerability.

Knowing the right tools to use or practices to follow can help you manage a private digital life. Using a password manager is essentially just using a more stern mentally to ensure you use difficult variations of your passwords. Privacy tech is also good to incorporate into your life. Using these types of browsers in everyday practice will help you reduce the overall amount of data gathered about you. Also, aside from just being typically more privacy-friendly by reducing the amount of data being stored about you, you are also increasing your speed thrice over. Regular search engine companies need data to be stored visibly.

Make it your first goal to check your settings. Start in all aspects that include your personal social media or any online profile, for that matter. Check your settings, and take a passive audit of your overall presence everywhere. Just make a quick overall click-through review of absolutely everything. After you complete this one-time task, let it sink in for a minute that this is only the first step. Protecting your personal data takes a lot of coaching because you have to train yourself that it is not a one-time responsibility. Continue to click around and review these settings regularly. Your personal data will thank you for it, and your internet presence will remain secure against cyber threats.