In the modern-day globalized world, any activity done online leaves its mark in the form of a digital footprint. With social media posts and the mere act of browsing the Internet, these traces create a distinct digital footprint that can be traced and profiled, as well as manipulated to control people. Although digital footprinting is a well-known practice in advertising and personalization, it also has its dangers when abused. The first step to internet privacy is knowing how your electronic footprint functions and how to measure it and reduce its size.
What Is a Digital Footprint?
A digital footprint is the evidence that you have left behind after using the internet. It encompasses all cookies and browsing history to social media sessions and email subscriptions.
Digital footprints can be classified in two categories:
- Active digital footprint: The information that you actively post, comment, or email out.
- Passive digital footprint: This is information that has been gathered without your conscious awareness, e.g., search history, cookies and tracking files left on websites and applications.
The programming codes by which websites are linked to social media can also be used to track your activity within and without the social media. This linkage tracking then increases the level of detail in your digital fingerprint that is more difficult to manage.
The importance of Digital Fingerprinting
The simplest method through which organizations or other malicious individuals can monitor an individual online is to digital fingerprint him/her. Advertisers depend on it to send targeted advertisements and businesses depend on it when it comes to personalization. Nevertheless, it may be misused as well, e.g.
- Spying on victims
- Making phishing attacks, which is social engineering.
- Spying on persons.
This is the duality of digital footprinting, which is an effective marketing strategy but can also pose a risk to privacy. A significant move in securing your online identity therefore is to minimize your footprint.
Is It possible to Measure a Digital Fingerprint?
Your digital footprint is almost impossible to be taken off to the ground or to measure accurately. Social media and mobile devices, especially, produce streams of data that are hard to delete, which are constant.
However, the size of your digital footprint is within your control by the information you post using your internet browser. Most browsers allow you to:
- Delete cookies regularly
- disable third-party tracking systems.
- Change privacy settings to restrict gathering of data.
To enhance better security, privacy-aware browsers like Tor, DuckDuckGo, and Brave are intended to minimize the volume of identifying information gathered about yourself.
How to Find out the Size of Your Digital Footprint.
There are a number of tools to assist you in quantifying your digital footprint. Such tools will either run a test on your browser to determine how much it has leaked or scan breaches and leaks to help you determine where your personal information was exposed.
Cover Your Tracks, which was created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is one of the tools that are the most popular. This non-profit digital rights organization developed the tool to enable users detect the effectiveness of their browser to keep their private information confidential.
The Working of the Cover Your Tracks Tool.
The Cover Your Tracks digital fingerprint test is based on the idea of making a series of requests to your browser to third parties. It then examines the amount of data gathered and presents a score of what the size of your digital foot print is.
Key points about the tool:
- It determines the uniqueness of your browser settings.
- It shows the ability of your browser to block trackers.
- It offers privacy improvement recommendations.
The test is easy to run: go to the Cover Your Tracks site, initiate the test and watch the results. Though finding and results could differ a bit based on browser extensions and add-ons, the general changes tend to be minimal.
Browser Test Results: Which Has the smallest digital footprint?
Digital Trends carried out a comprehensive test on the popular browsers to determine what digital footprint they leave behind. The data were in bits, and the result was as follows:
| Browser | Digital Footprint (bits of data) |
|---|---|
| Vivaldi | 17.2 |
| Safari (Apple) | 17.2 |
| Chrome (Google) | 18.2 |
| Brave | 18.2 |
| Edge (Microsoft) | 18.2 |
| Opera | 18.2 |
| Perplexit’s Comet | 18.2 |
The results indicate that the majority of browsers which are based on the open-source Chromium engine abandon the same level of data. Safari and Vivaldi were the least represented on the internet and were a bit more privacy-friendly.
How to Reduce Your Online Presence.
Although you can never take away your digital fingerprint, you can do something to minimize it:
- Browse using privacy oriented browsers such as Tor or Brave.
- Unclear cookies and cache on a regular basis on your browser.
- Minimize the personal information you disclose on social media.
- Install the extensions of tracker-blocking to avoid third-party data collection.
- Track your online footprint with other tools such as Cover Your Tracks.
When these practices are merged, you can greatly decrease the level of information that can be accessed by advertisers, hackers or even third parties.
Final Thoughts
A digital footprint is the inevitable aspect of the contemporary life, and it does not need to violate your privacy. Learning the mechanics of the digital fingerprinting technique and applying such tools as Cover Your Tracks, you can become a master of your own online appearance.
It is not to leave a footprint completely that is virtually unfeasible, but to make its size as small as possible and make the personal data as safe as you can. It is no longer a choice to take care of your digital identity in the era of data being currency, so it is obligatory.
