Digital Footprints
Everything you do on the internet leaves a digital footprint. By a digital footprint, we mean that there is evidence of a particular activity you have carried out on the internet. Digital footprints can be in the form of an email you sent or a website you browsed. It also includes your IP address and location in certain scenarios.
Your digital footprints can be used for a variety of purposes. It can be used with malicious intentions as well as for advertisements. You may have seen that after visiting some commercial site, you see advertisements of products you looked at on other sites. Therefore one must be careful about their digital footprint.
There are two kinds of digital footprints we leave:
1. Active
2. Passive
1. Active
Active digital footprints are those footprints that we leave intentionally. Examples of these are sending emails or leaving comments on social media services.
2. Passive
Passive digital footprints are those footprints that we leave unintentionally. Examples of these are data recorded by websites and data recorded from your browser searches.
If you look into your browser settings, you will see that you can change the settings for your digital footprints like cookies, saved passwords, and cookies.
Even if we delete a particular piece of data, for example, a comment on a post, it is not completely erased from the internet as it will still be stored in the service’s servers. Therefore we must be extremely cautious about our activities on the internet, as they can be traced back to us.
