Your digital footprint can offer you benefits, particularly when it is carefully managed and used to your advantage. Here are some key benefits:
Your digital footprint helps websites and services to personalise your experience. Recommendations for products, services, and content based on your preferences can save time and improve your satisfaction with an online service. Your location, and your location history, are also part of your digital footprint. Google and other sites will deliver food, products & services and travel recommendations based on your location and the places that you visit.
Sites, e.g., social media and YouTube, will offer you recommendations based on your previous activity on that site, which might help show you online content that you're likely to be interested in.
Online forms, shopping, and services can be more convenient when sites remember your details, reducing the need for repeated data entry (and therefore reducing the chances of a making a mistake!)
A positive and professional digital footprint can enhance your reputation and help highlight your skills, experience and achievements to potential employers.
Social media platforms and professional networks help you to form good and useful connections with peers, colleagues and potential employers. You can even make new friends online!
A digital footprint can serve as a digital diary, preserving memories, achievements, and important life events. Social media timelines, online photo albums, and blogs are handy ways of documenting your personal history (or perhaps those aspects of it that you wish to document).
Sites can recommend content, but that can go horribly wrong. Studies have shown that YouTube's recommendation algorithm will promote conspiracy theories, sexually explicit and violent content, promotion of self-harm and racist, homophobic and misogynistic content regardless of age, gender or self-declared interests.
Alternatively, if you go looking at dodgy (as above) content, don't be surprised if you're recommended dogy content or see ads for dodgy services. Wouldn't that be embarrassing if someone is sitting beside you (and thinking, "why are they being recommended *that*?")
Companies and governments can - and do - track online activities, leading to concerns about surveillance and loss of privacy.
Data shared with one platform can often be accessed by third parties, sometimes without explicit consent, and sometimes your data can be sold onwards.
Personal information can be exposed through your social media posts, online shopping, and other digital activities, making it accessible to unauthorised parties.
Personal data available online can be used by cybercriminals to steal identities, leading to financial loss and legal issues.
Personal data shared online can be used for bullying, harassment and "doxxing" (releasing personally identifying information about someone online without their consent). Related to doxxing is "swatting" - sending a police or emergency service response team to another person's address through false reporting of a serious law enforcement emergency. Swatting is rare, thankfully, but terrifying for the victim.
Embarrassing or inappropriate content posted online can damage personal and professional reputations. Once information is online, it can be difficult to remove, especially after it has been shared.
Once information is posted online, it can be difficult to completely remove, leading to a long-lasting digital record. Sites like the Wayback Machine and Archive Today can archive webpages permanently.
Who Can See Your Digital Footprint? How Is Your Digital Footprint Created? >>
