A digital footprint is a collection of personal information you leave online, such as your email address, your location, and the things you purchase. A digital footprint, also known as a digital shadow or an electronic footprint, is the trail of data you leave behind when you use the internet.
Along with the data, businesses understand you through cookies and tracking scripts, and it also includes information you willingly contribute through social network postings, blog accounts, and online forms.
How Do You Know Digital Footprints?
Digital shadow includes websites visited, emails sent, and information submitted online. People’s internet actions and gadgets can be tracked via their digital footprint. Digital footprints may be active and passive causing Digital Pollution.
The internet footprint is the digital trace we leave after visiting websites. These are generally referred to as “cookies,” and most websites will ask you to approve the usage of cookies before you can visit the site, even if you have no idea what this means. By utilizing a straightforward search engine, other individuals might passively or actively gather much of the information we unintentionally leave behind about ourselves.
How Can you Reduce Digital Footprints?
The user-intentionally left data trails are known as active data traces. People leave active digital traces by posting on Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, connecting on social networks, uploading images and videos, and communicating by email, phone, and chat. Digital footprints are visible to everyone.
According to our analysis, this is where you have to reduce your Digital Footprint and enhance the environment around us for the next generations.
- If you are sending an email or opening an email sent by someone.
- If you are reading or publishing one Blog.
- Browsing Social media, posting a story/picture, or liking a post.
- Any Subscription Model.
- Switching on your location for specific apps.
- Online Shopping.
There are a few things that you can control, but what if we tell you there are a few things that cannot be in your control? So, for example, while we should be aware that they may make efforts to limit the number of people who can view what they post online, it’s critical that they also understand that the Internet is public and that certain things will never be entirely under their control. As like:
a. Photos Upload:
When you post a photo online, the website you posted it to may claim ownership of it. However, data will always be available, stored on their servers, and mainly outside your control, even if websites like Facebook never do anything with it, whether you upload a poor image and delete it shortly after or Archive it.
b. IP Address:
Every minute thing on the internet is somehow associated with an IP (Internet Protocol) address. Taking this as an advantage, hackers use this information to steal data from your computer or try to sneak a virus, and a virus protector can use it to identify the device used in a crime. VPN is the only way to conceal this and protect you from hackers by not stealing your data.
Authored by:
Abhigna Arcot
Senior Content Writer
