Digital footprint
Encyclopedia
A digital footprint is a trail left by an entity's interactions in a digital environment
; including their usage of TV, mobile phone
, internet
and world wide web
, mobile web
and other devices and sensors. Digital footprints provide data on what an entity has performed in the digital environment; and are valuable in assisting behavioural targeting, personalisation, targeted marketing, digital reputation
, and other social media
or social graph
ing services.
In social media
, a digital footprint is the size of an individuals online presence; as it relates to the number of individuals they interact with.
, or profiling
purposes.
One of the first references to a digital footprint was by Nicholas Negroponte
, naming it the slug trail in his book Being Digital
in 1996. John Battelle
called digital footprints the clickstream exhaust, while Tim O'Reilly
and Esther Dyson
titled it the data exhaust. Early usage of the term focused on information left by web activity alone, but came to represent data created and consumed by all devices and sensors.
, location
, time of day, search results and key words, content created and consumed, digital activity and data from sensor, and from the users social crowd. Some data can come from deep IP and Internet data, such as footprinting
. Value created from the collection of inputs and analysis of the data are recommendation
, protection
, personalisation, ability to trade or barter and contextual
adaptation. Part of the analysis phase is Reality mining
); becoming usable by interested third parties to improve recommendation. Collection of data from multiple user interactions and purchases generates improved recommendations. If the same parties collect data on how that user interacts with, or influences others interactions, the service, there is an additional component of data - the output of one process becomes the input to the next.
The closed loop digital footprint was first explained by Tony Fish in his book on digital footprints in January 2010. The closed loop takes data from the open loop and provides this as a new data input. This new data determines what the user has reacted to, or how they have been influenced. The feedback then builds a digital footprint based on social data, and the controller of the social digital footprint data can determine who and why people purchase and behave.
According to a Pew Internet report published in 2007, there are two main classifications for digital footprints: passive and active. A passive digital footprint is created when data is collected about an action without any client activation, whereas active digital footprints are created when personal data is released deliberately by a user for the purpose of sharing information about oneself.
Passive digital footprints can be stored in many ways depending on the situation. In an online environment a footprint may be stored in an online data base as a hit. This footprint may track the user IP address
, when it was created, and where they came from; with the footprint later being analyzed. In an offline environment, a footprint may be stored in files, which can be accessed by administrators
to view the actions performed on the machine, without being able to see who performed them.
Active digital footprints can be also be stored in many ways depending on the situation. In an online environment, a footprint can be stored by a user being logged into a site when making a post or edit, with the registered name being connected to the edit. In an off line environment a footprint may be stored in files, when the owner of the computer uses a keylogger, so logs can show the actions performed on the machine, and who performed them.
is the internet footprint; also known as cyber shadow or digital shadow, information is left behind as a result of a user's web-browsing activities, including through the use of cookie
s. The term usually applies to an individual person, but can also refer to a business, organization, corporation or object.
Information may be intentionally or unintentionally left behind by the user; with it being either passively or actively collected by other interested parties. Depending on the amount of information left behind, it may be simple for other parties to gather large amounts of information on that individual using simple search engines. Internet footprints are used by interested parties for several reasons; including cyber-vetting, where interviewers could research applicants based on their online activities. Internet footprints are also used by law enforcement agencies, to provide information that would be unavailable otherwise due to a lack of probable cause
.
Social networking systems may record activities of individuals, with data becoming a life stream
. Such usage of social media
and roaming services allow digital tracing data to include individual interests, social groups, behaviours, and location. Such data can be gathered from sensors within devices, and collected and analyzed without user awareness.
or passport
, but the meta data collected impacts upon internet privacy
, trust, security
, digital reputation
, and recommendation
. As the digital world expands and integrates with more aspects of life, ownership and rights of data becomes important. Digital footprints are controversial in that privacy and openness are in competition. Scott McNealy
said in 1999 Get Over It when referring to privacy on the internet, becoming a commonly used quote in relationship to private data and what companies do with it.
While a digital footprint can be used to infer personal information without their knowledge, it also exposes individuals private psychological sphere into the social sphere (see Bruno Latour
's article ). Lifelogging is an example of indiscriminate collection of information concerning an individuals life and behaviour .
Digital environment
A natural environment is all living and non-living things that occur naturally on Earth, A Digital Environment is a created world within a computer, or a group of computers...
; including their usage of TV, mobile phone
Mobile phone
A mobile phone is a device which can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile network operator...
, internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
and world wide web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
, mobile web
Mobile Web
The Mobile Web refers to the use of Internet-connected applications, or browser-based access to the Internet from a mobile device, such as a smartphone or tablet computer, connected to a wireless network....
and other devices and sensors. Digital footprints provide data on what an entity has performed in the digital environment; and are valuable in assisting behavioural targeting, personalisation, targeted marketing, digital reputation
Reputation
Reputation of a social entity is an opinion about that entity, typically a result of social evaluation on a set of criteria...
, and other social media
Social media
The term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0,...
or social graph
Social graph
The social graph is a term coined by scientists working in the social areas of graph theory. It has been described as "the global mapping of everybody and how they're related"...
ing services.
In social media
Social media
The term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0,...
, a digital footprint is the size of an individuals online presence; as it relates to the number of individuals they interact with.
Description
A digital footprint is a collection of activities and behaviours recorded when an entity (such as a person) interacts in a digital environment. It may include the recording of activities such as system login and logouts, visits to a web-page, accessed or created files, or emails and chat messages. The digital footprint allows interested parties to access this data; possibly for data miningData mining
Data mining , a relatively young and interdisciplinary field of computer science is the process of discovering new patterns from large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and database systems...
, or profiling
Profiling
Profiling, the extrapolation of information about something, based on known qualities, may refer specifically to:* Profiling practices * Forensic profiling, used in several types of forensic sciences* Offender profiling...
purposes.
One of the first references to a digital footprint was by Nicholas Negroponte
Nicholas Negroponte
Nicholas Negroponte is an American architect best known as the founder and Chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, and also known as the founder of the One Laptop per Child Association ....
, naming it the slug trail in his book Being Digital
Being Digital
Being Digital is a non-fiction book about digital technologies and their possible future by technology author Nicholas Negroponte. It was originally published in January 1995 by Vintage Publishing....
in 1996. John Battelle
John Battelle
John Linwood Battelle is a journalist as well as founder and chairman of Federated Media Publishing. He is a visiting professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley and also maintains Searchblog, a weblog covering search, technology, and media.Battelle is one of the original...
called digital footprints the clickstream exhaust, while Tim O'Reilly
Tim O'Reilly
Tim O'Reilly is the founder of O'Reilly Media and a supporter of the free software and open source movements.-Life and career:...
and Esther Dyson
Esther Dyson
Esther Dyson is a former journalist and Wall Street technology analyst who is a leading angel investor, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and commentator focused on breakthrough innovation in healthcare, government transparency, digital technology, biotechnology, and space...
titled it the data exhaust. Early usage of the term focused on information left by web activity alone, but came to represent data created and consumed by all devices and sensors.
Footprinting process
Inputs to digital footprint include attentionAttention
Attention is the cognitive process of paying attention to one aspect of the environment while ignoring others. Attention is one of the most intensely studied topics within psychology and cognitive neuroscience....
, location
Location (geography)
The terms location and place in geography are used to identify a point or an area on the Earth's surface or elsewhere. The term 'location' generally implies a higher degree of can certainty than "place" which often has an ambiguous boundary relying more on human/social attributes of place identity...
, time of day, search results and key words, content created and consumed, digital activity and data from sensor, and from the users social crowd. Some data can come from deep IP and Internet data, such as footprinting
Footprinting
Footprinting is the technique of gathering information about computer systems and the entities they belong to. This is done by employing various computer security techniques, as:*DNS queries*Network enumeration*Network queries...
. Value created from the collection of inputs and analysis of the data are recommendation
Recommendation
A recommendation can be:* In technical contexts, a norm or a norm * Recommender systems use Information filtering systems to create computer generated recommendations* European Union recommendation, in international law...
, protection
Protection
Protection may refer to:-Music:*Protection , by Massive Attack*"Protection" *"Protection" *"Protection," a song by Krokus from To You All...
, personalisation, ability to trade or barter and contextual
Contextual
Contextual may refer to:*Contextual advertising, advertisements based on other content displayed*Contextual design, user-centered design process developed by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt...
adaptation. Part of the analysis phase is Reality mining
Reality mining
Reality mining is the collection and analysis of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behavior, with the goal of identifying predictable patterns of behavior...
Feedback loop
In an open system, data is collected from a user, which is used to build a profile (see Profiling practicesProfiling practices
Profiling refers to the whole process of construction and application of profiles generated by computerized profiling technologies. What characterizes profiling technologies is the use of algorithms or other mathematical techniques that allow one to discover patterns or correlations in large...
); becoming usable by interested third parties to improve recommendation. Collection of data from multiple user interactions and purchases generates improved recommendations. If the same parties collect data on how that user interacts with, or influences others interactions, the service, there is an additional component of data - the output of one process becomes the input to the next.
The closed loop digital footprint was first explained by Tony Fish in his book on digital footprints in January 2010. The closed loop takes data from the open loop and provides this as a new data input. This new data determines what the user has reacted to, or how they have been influenced. The feedback then builds a digital footprint based on social data, and the controller of the social digital footprint data can determine who and why people purchase and behave.
According to a Pew Internet report published in 2007, there are two main classifications for digital footprints: passive and active. A passive digital footprint is created when data is collected about an action without any client activation, whereas active digital footprints are created when personal data is released deliberately by a user for the purpose of sharing information about oneself.
Passive digital footprints can be stored in many ways depending on the situation. In an online environment a footprint may be stored in an online data base as a hit. This footprint may track the user IP address
IP address
An Internet Protocol address is a numerical label assigned to each device participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing...
, when it was created, and where they came from; with the footprint later being analyzed. In an offline environment, a footprint may be stored in files, which can be accessed by administrators
System administrator
A system administrator, IT systems administrator, systems administrator, or sysadmin is a person employed to maintain and operate a computer system and/or network...
to view the actions performed on the machine, without being able to see who performed them.
Active digital footprints can be also be stored in many ways depending on the situation. In an online environment, a footprint can be stored by a user being logged into a site when making a post or edit, with the registered name being connected to the edit. In an off line environment a footprint may be stored in files, when the owner of the computer uses a keylogger, so logs can show the actions performed on the machine, and who performed them.
Web browsing
The digital footprint applicable specifically to the World Wide WebWorld Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
is the internet footprint; also known as cyber shadow or digital shadow, information is left behind as a result of a user's web-browsing activities, including through the use of cookie
HTTP cookie
A cookie, also known as an HTTP cookie, web cookie, or browser cookie, is used for an origin website to send state information to a user's browser and for the browser to return the state information to the origin site...
s. The term usually applies to an individual person, but can also refer to a business, organization, corporation or object.
Information may be intentionally or unintentionally left behind by the user; with it being either passively or actively collected by other interested parties. Depending on the amount of information left behind, it may be simple for other parties to gather large amounts of information on that individual using simple search engines. Internet footprints are used by interested parties for several reasons; including cyber-vetting, where interviewers could research applicants based on their online activities. Internet footprints are also used by law enforcement agencies, to provide information that would be unavailable otherwise due to a lack of probable cause
Probable cause
In United States criminal law, probable cause is the standard by which an officer or agent of the law has the grounds to make an arrest, to conduct a personal or property search, or to obtain a warrant for arrest, etc. when criminal charges are being considered. It is also used to refer to the...
.
Social networking systems may record activities of individuals, with data becoming a life stream
Lifestreaming
The term lifestream was coined by Eric Freeman and David Gelernter at Yale University in the mid-1990s to describe "...a time-ordered stream of documents that functions as a diary of your electronic life; every document you create and every document other people send you is stored in your lifestream...
. Such usage of social media
Social media
The term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0,...
and roaming services allow digital tracing data to include individual interests, social groups, behaviours, and location. Such data can be gathered from sensors within devices, and collected and analyzed without user awareness.
Privacy issues
Digital footprints are not a digital identityDigital identity
Digital identity is the aspect of digital technology that is concerned with the mediation of people's experience of their own identity and the identity of other people and things...
or passport
Passport
A passport is a document, issued by a national government, which certifies, for the purpose of international travel, the identity and nationality of its holder. The elements of identity are name, date of birth, sex, and place of birth....
, but the meta data collected impacts upon internet privacy
Internet privacy
Internet privacy involves the right or mandate of personal privacy concerning the storing, repurposing, providing to third-parties, and displaying of information pertaining to oneself via the Internet. Privacy can entail both Personally Identifying Information or non-PII information such as a...
, trust, security
Security
Security is the degree of protection against danger, damage, loss, and crime. Security as a form of protection are structures and processes that provide or improve security as a condition. The Institute for Security and Open Methodologies in the OSSTMM 3 defines security as "a form of protection...
, digital reputation
Reputation
Reputation of a social entity is an opinion about that entity, typically a result of social evaluation on a set of criteria...
, and recommendation
Recommendation
A recommendation can be:* In technical contexts, a norm or a norm * Recommender systems use Information filtering systems to create computer generated recommendations* European Union recommendation, in international law...
. As the digital world expands and integrates with more aspects of life, ownership and rights of data becomes important. Digital footprints are controversial in that privacy and openness are in competition. Scott McNealy
Scott McNealy
Scott McNealy is an American business executive. He co-founded computer technology company Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Andy Bechtolsheim.-Biography:...
said in 1999 Get Over It when referring to privacy on the internet, becoming a commonly used quote in relationship to private data and what companies do with it.
While a digital footprint can be used to infer personal information without their knowledge, it also exposes individuals private psychological sphere into the social sphere (see Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour is a French sociologist of science and anthropologist and an influential theorist in the field of Science and Technology Studies...
's article ). Lifelogging is an example of indiscriminate collection of information concerning an individuals life and behaviour .
See also
- Behavioral targetingBehavioral targetingBehavioral targeting is a technique used by online publishers and advertisers to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns.Behavioral targeting uses information collected on an individual's web-browsing behavior, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select...
- Digital identityDigital identityDigital identity is the aspect of digital technology that is concerned with the mediation of people's experience of their own identity and the identity of other people and things...
- Internet privacyInternet privacyInternet privacy involves the right or mandate of personal privacy concerning the storing, repurposing, providing to third-parties, and displaying of information pertaining to oneself via the Internet. Privacy can entail both Personally Identifying Information or non-PII information such as a...
- Online identityOnline identityAn online identity, internet identity, or internet persona is a social identity that an Internet user establishes in online communities and websites...
- Reality miningReality miningReality mining is the collection and analysis of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behavior, with the goal of identifying predictable patterns of behavior...
- Reputation managementReputation managementReputation management , also known as directory management, is the process of tracking an entity's actions and other entities' opinions about those actions; reporting on those actions and opinions; and reacting to that report creating a feedback loop. All entities involved are generally people, but...
- Targeted marketing