Whenever you do something online, you leave a trail of information behind that can be used to uniquely identify and track you. This is your digital footprint(nouvelle fenêtre). In this article, we’ll look at:
- What is a digital footprint?
- Digital footprint examples
- Why does your digital footprint matter?
- How to check your digital footprint
- How to protect your digital footprint
- If in doubt, trust open source
What is a digital footprint?
Digital footprints can be categorized into two main types:
- Active digital footprint: Information you deliberately share, such as social media posts, emails(nouvelle fenêtre), and form submissions.
- Passive digital footprint: Data collected without your explicit knowledge, such as cookies that track your browsing habits, websites that log your IP address when you visit them, and apps that record your location data.
Of course, these are not neat divisions. Crucially, companies such as Google and Facebook(nouvelle fenêtre), whose business models rely on invading your privacy to better target you with highly personalized ads, are highly adept at mapping your passive digital footprint to your real-world persona as expressed through your active digital footprint.
Digital footprint examples
Examples of active and passive digital footprints include:
Active digital footprint
- Social media posts: Updates, photos, videos, or comments shared on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn
- Emails: This is especially true when using “free” email services like Gmail that monetize by invading your privacy
- Online reviews: Feedback left on platforms such as Yelp, Amazon, or Google Reviews
- Form submissions: Details you provide when you register online, complete a survey, or enter a contest
- Content uploads: Videos you upload to YouTube, blog posts, or files shared on cloud storage
- Online purchases: Your shopping history, product reviews, and wishlist additions
Passive digital footprint
- Cookies and tracking data: Information collected by websites about your browsing habits, including the sites you visit and the products you view.
- IP address logs: Records of your location and unique identifier collected by websites and services you access.
- Search history: The queries you type into search engines like Google or Bing (see our article on privacy-focused Google alternatives(nouvelle fenêtre)).
- App usage data: The Android and iOS operating systems perform background tracking of how and when you use apps and often share this information with app developers.
- Location data: GPS tracking from your mobile devices and apps.
- Connected devices: Information shared when smart devices (such as wearables and smart TVs) interact with the internet.
Why does your digital footprint matter?
Your active digital footprint matters because it defines your online identity, telling the world who you are, what you’re interested in, and what matters to you. What you voluntarily divulge online can potentially have serious consequences.
For example, employers often check online profiles during the hiring process, so posts, comments, or photos can influence their perception of you (positively or negatively). This is also true for colleges, scholarship committees, and potential business partners who might research your online presence. And, of course, some things said online can lead to criminal or civil legal action.
Your passive digital footprint is mainly exploited by commercial companies keen to know as much about you as possible so they can sell you stuff(nouvelle fenêtre) more effectively (or at least claim to). It’s also likely monitored by both your government(nouvelle fenêtre) and other governments (such as those of the 5 Eyes spying alliance).
The dangers posed by shadowy organizations with dubious motives collecting troves of highly intimate information about you is beyond the scope of this article, but privacy is a human right, and it’s always worth remembering that knowledge is power.
How to check your digital footprint
You can check your active digital footprint by reviewing your social media accounts on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Look for public posts, photos, or comments you might want to remove or make private. You should also check your privacy settings to ensure only your intended audience can see your content. To find out what potential employers and other members of the public can learn about you online, do what they do — Google yourself.
Checking your passive digital footprint (that is, what big tech companies, governments, and even individual websites know about you), however, is all but impossible, as it’s not in their interests to divulge this information to you (quite the opposite, in fact).
How to protect your digital footprint
To a large extent, you have control over your own active digital footprint. You decide what you say, share, and how you present yourself online. In many parts of the world, simply being nice and taking care not to divulge personal details that could be exploited by criminals (for example, to launch social engineering attacks against you or others you know) may be enough to ensure your active digital footprint does no damage.
If necessary, you can delete past posts and tighten up your social security settings (for example, by ensuring only friends can read your posts). Of course, content posted on platforms that don’t allow you to limit access (such as sent emails) is much harder to control. Some countries (notably those in the EU(nouvelle fenêtre)) have right to be forgotten(nouvelle fenêtre) laws that require search engines to remove personal information about you from searches if it’s no longer relevant. Still, in most places, you can do nothing except request the platform holders (like Google) to remove the information.
It’s generally much harder to protect your passive digital footprint, but there are actions you can take to minimize it. Some of the most important of these include:
Use a VPN
By default, every website you visit can uniquely identify you using your IP address. The first step in protecting your passive digital footprint is to hide your IP address, which is easily achieved by using a VPN service such as Proton VPN. A VPN routes your connection through a VPN server so that websites you visit see its IP address, not your real IP address. The connection is also encrypted so other third parties (such as your ISP and, by extension, your government) cannot see what you do online.
Good VPN services reduce your digital footprint even further by keeping no logs of what you do online (Proton VPN’s strict no-logs policy is independently audited annually). Proton VPN additionally offers NetShield Ad-blocker, a DNS filtering feature that helps protect you against trackers (and malware).
Learn more about how VPNs work
Use email aliases
Every service you sign up for asks you to sign in using a social media account or, failing that, a working email address. Registering by email is much more privacy-friendly than sharing your social media details (which is nothing more than a reciprocal data-sharing arrangement between the service and social media platform where the only loser is your privacy), but it still allows the service to uniquely identify you.
The best solution is to use disposable email addresses and create a new one for each service you sign up for. However, this can be tiresome, especially if you need to keep some of them active to receive news and notifications, and for account recovery. But with Proton Pass’s hide-my-email(nouvelle fenêtre) feature, you can easily create a new alias for every service you use. Emails sent to the alias address will arrive in your Proton Mail inbox, and you can simply deactivate an alias when you no longer need or want it.
Use end-to-end encryption
Most online services use encryption to protect your data from criminal hackers, but since they are the ones encrypting your data on their servers, they can also decrypt it at will (and therefore access it or even hand it over to third parties). Google’s Gmail, for example, scans(nouvelle fenêtre) all your emails(nouvelle fenêtre) to provide you with a “more helpful & personalized experience”.
With end-to-end encryption (E2EE), your data is encrypted on your device before being sent to a third party server. This means only you (or someone you’ve authorized) can decrypt it. Not whichever service you’re using (including Proton). Using E2EE wherever possible therefore greatly reduces your digital footprint. Proton provides a suite of E2EE products, including Proton Mail(nouvelle fenêtre), Proton Drive(nouvelle fenêtre), Proton Pass(nouvelle fenêtre), and Proton Calendar(nouvelle fenêtre).
Note that while services such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and iMessage use E2EE to secure message contents, they collect a large amount of metadata (such as who you message, when, and how often). Using more privacy-focused messenger apps(nouvelle fenêtre) (such as Signal) is much better for reducing your digital footprint.
Block third-party cookies
Browser cookies perform a host of genuinely useful functions that improve your online experience, but third-party cookies are an insidious menace whose purpose is almost entirely to track your behavior across different websites. Fortunately, most modern browsers allow you to block them.
Learn how to block third-party cookies on al browsers
Final thoughts — If in doubt, trust open source
It’s very hard (essentially impossible) to leave no digital footprints behind if you spend any time online. Even attempting this (by using Tor, for example), makes much of the internet unusable for day-to-day activities. You have a great deal of control over what you do and say online (your active digital footprint), but managing your shadowy passive footprint is much harder (often because you’re not even aware of it).
That said, there are many privacy-focused tools available (not least those by Proton) that can help you manage and minimize your passive digital footprint. The best of these tools are open source(nouvelle fenêtre), which means anyone can examine their code to ensure they are secure and doing only what they are supposed to.
Of course, most people don’t have the skills to do this. In an ideal world, all open source code should be independently audited by experts (as all Proton apps are), but the mere fact that it can be checked should provide some level of confidence in it.
