What is a Digital Footprint

What is a Digital Footprint

1. A record or trace we leave behind us as we use internet.

2. Why did we start leaving such big footprints?

   • Cookies are why we leave big footprints. They link the actions you take into a string of letters and digits, which can help protect your transactions, but it also will link different personal information into one thing. All this linked information can create a big profile of us.

3. What is the economic bargain for Internet users?

   • Websites use your digital footprints to maximize profit and advertisers use them to sell their product to the right consumer. They can use cookie data to do so, but advertisers usually get their information from data you give to websites to use the websites' services.

4. Are digital footprints a problem?

   • They are a problem for our privacy because they can be use to track us, or link more information about us. It also does not allow us to be easily anonymous, because even if we shared a bit of information, we can't be anonymous any more. Additionally, digital footprint can be use by malicious purposes by malicious people. It reduces public trust in the Internet and it can inhibits freedom of expression and freedom of action in the online domain.
   • Do different devices make different digital footprints?
     • Smartphones have many features that make your phone unique, like SIM card number, and they can cause people to track you through your phone. The smartphone device itself may know some personal data. You may not have much control over your information as you though. On the other hand, computers browsers can control cookies and other personal information. If you are concerned about your digital footprint, you need to take an active role in managing your privacy settings.

5. How can I manage my digital footprint?

   • There are four levels at which you can choose to manage and control your digital footprints. First, Improve your understanding of the basic issues; then develop your “basic hygiene” habits; next become a sophisticated user of your online tools and services; And finally find and use specific privacy-enhancing tools. Remember, to manage cookies, check privacy settings, and know what happens when you share information to help privatize your personal information
     • Think about the implications of everything shared on the Internet being a privacy risk to some degree.
     • If you use different “personas” for different aspects of your online life, like whether that's one email address for work and another for home, or a one credit card for online shopping and another for everything else – it will help keep different parts of your digital footprint separate, but be mindful about what you share via social sites and elsewhere, because that data is probably more public and persistent than you might anticipate.
     • Very often, the default settings for browsers, devices, and apps are set to disclose, rather than secure, your personal data. It's worth taking the time to look at those settings and make sure you're comfortable with them. When an application asks for permission to send you push notifications and use your location data, take a moment to reflect on what it's saying and if you want that to happen. Be careful when posting pictures, because they may have location and time information you are sending with the photo.
     • There are many privacy-enhancing tools out there you can use not just to protect specific areas of your digital footprint, but also to maintain your awareness and understanding of what service providers are looking at.

6. Who is tracking me and how do they do it?

   • How does legislation affect our digital footprint?
     • Some countries have laws that are designed to protect pre-defined classes of data that are traditionally considered more sensitive, including medical data, financial data, and government issued identifiers.
     • Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights refer to the individual's right to respect for their privacy or private life, but there is no privacy or data protection law that applies everywhere in the world: no single set of data processing rules that covers all Internet services and users. Since the Internet does not respect national boundaries, we need to find ways of increasing the consistency of legal protection, while respecting national and cultural differences. There is fairly widespread international agreement on a set of key principles but the practicalities of privacy law and enforcement vary widely by country.
       • Some countries and regions, such as Europe, take a rights-based approach towards data protection and privacy. Others, even if they do not take a rights-based approach, have adopted a “comprehensive” approach to privacy. Yet, others, such as the United States, rely on more industry-specific laws, self-regulated best practice and codes of conduct. Then, there are the countries that have no (or only rudimentary) privacy laws. These differences all increase the challenge of bridging the gap between country-specific laws and the frontier-less nature of the Internet. To enable cross-border flows while protecting privacy, a number of groups of countries have reached binding or non-binding agreements.
         • Sometimes these binding or non-binding agreements, or technology-specific laws, can genuinely improve the users’ browsing experience and/or security (for instance, if cookies are used in support of a two-factor authentication protocol).
         • However, technology-specific laws may also have the unintended consequence of shifting the unwanted activity outside the scope of the law. This kind of approach may, perversely, give service providers an incentive to look for other, unregulated means to monitor or profile users, such as browser fingerprinting and server-based storage which may prove harder (or impossible) for the users to detect.
         • A critical regulatory factor is the issue of consent. User consent plays an important role in extending collection, use and disclosure of “personal data” beyond what is strictly necessary to provide a product or a service. One approach is to insist that decision-making must rest with the individual most likely to be affected, but putting this into practice can be more problematic than one might expect.
           • This is because, Internet users: rarely have the information or understanding they need to make an informed decision. They are often given choices that are binary (i.e. say “yes” or you don’t get the service). The users may have only uncertain knowledge and incomplete information on the potential consequences of consenting. Users are increasingly asked to disclose personal data of other people, such as when a service asks for your contact list.
   • The three things who work together to track users and create composite profiles are the Advertisers, Publishers, and Aggregators.
     • When you browse a website, the site places a tracking cookie in your web browser. The browser will store that cookie on your device and it will send that cookie back to the web site each and every time you return to it or ask for another page. Each of the web sites that you browse operates independently and send tracking cookies to your browser. The browser will only send back the URL of the content that you looked for and the cookie to the web site that set them. And if any of those web pages have advertisements from third parties on them, the third parties will also send their own tracking cookies. The websites don’t really have any information about who you are or your profile since you did not authenticate to any of these websites, but they can still guess your age, sex, income and other details from your reading and browsing habits.
       • When you create an account, the web site places a cookie in your web browser, as before, but this time it also leaves a “third party cookie” with data for the aggregator. This is a cookie left by one website, but containing the URL (the “return address”) of another – in this case, the aggregator. Your browser sends back the cookie to both the website that you just browsed as well as to the data aggregator. The data aggregator gets data from multiple websites. The aggregator puts all this together, filters them and profiles the user with dozens of different criteria: age, income, shopping habits, sex, location, interests, you name it. Aggregators work with publishers to sort viewers into different categories, and then offer advertisers the prospect of access to those “eyeballs”.

7. What dynamics are at work with digital footprints?

   • Cultural Dynamics
     • Online services must all originate somewhere and that often infuses them with a particular cultural perspective. Each country brings to the Internet its own cultural norms, legislative and regulatory models, and economic frameworks. Digital footprints produce different reactions across the diverse constituencies that make up the Internet. What is acceptable and common to one group is sometimes unacceptable and unusual to another. This is part of the nature of the Internet.
   • Convenience Dynamic
     • Most of us would rather use something which is convenient but privacy-eroding, than use a product that makes life less convenient for us. Like many kinds of human behaviour (smoking, eating fatty food, poor posture), if we cannot see an immediate harm from our actions, we tend to assume they aren't harming us. The combination of convenience and lack of apparent harm lulls us into privacy-eroding habits.
   • Economic Dynamic
     • The economic dynamic gives a service provider a strong incentive to collect data, and to keep users under-informed about that aspect of the service. Thus even Internet users who are very active in controlling the digital footprints they leave, have no option but to rely on imperfect knowledge. For example, it is in the interests of a social network service to encourage users to ignore the fact that everything they do within their social circle is being inspected and monetized by a third party and in some areas, even if competing services are available, other factors might make the competitive service unattractive – for example, a social network will have little appeal if none of your friends is using it.