Digital footprint

A Digital Footprint is the data trace or trail left by someone's activity in a digital environment. Digital Footprints are the capture in an electronic fashion of memories and moments and are built from the interaction with TV, mobile phone, World Wide Web, Internet, mobile web and other digital devices. Digital Footprints are invisible but provide data on where the person has been, how long they stayed, both via the web and by location (geography), how often, the route or routine and increasingly who with.

Digital Footprints are extremely valuable as they provide the building block for behavioral targeting, personalisation, targeted marketing and other social media services.

A Digital Footprint is not your digital identity but it does have strong links to meta data, internet privacy, trust, security and digital reputation

One of the first references to a Digital Footprint was by Nicholas Negroponte who called it the slug trail in his book Being Digital. John Battelle calls Digital Footprints the ClickStream Exhaust, it is also referred to as the Data Exhaust by Tim O'Reilly and Esther Dyson. defines the process of collecting, storing, analysing the digital footprint data to create value as My Digital Footprint

It easy to understand how Google and Facebook use Digital Footprints to offer services for free and improve user interfaces by direct customer feedback, it is less clear who owns what and what rights individuals have to their own data. In Fish's book the ownership is the next major battle gound for Web 2.0 companies and they the key strategic issues are who owns the data, what rights to companies have to use the data and the new business models digital footprints generate.

My Digital Footprint

Inputs to your digital footprint are Attention, Location (geography, time of day, Search results and key words, Content created and consumed and digital activity.

Value created from the collection of your inputs and analysis of the data are:- intent, reputation, discovery, recommendation, protection, personalisation, ability to trade or barter and contextual adaptation.

Pew Internet report

According to the Pew Internet report 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. In social media, "digital footprint" can refer to the size of one's online presence as it relates to the number of individuals he or she is interacting with.

Passive digital footprints 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], the time when it was created, and where they came from, this footprint later can be analyzed by a network manager

In an off line environment a footprint may be stored in local temp files, which can be accessed by administrators to view the actions done on that computer, but they can not see who did them. hi whats up bob

Active digital footprints

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, that registered name gets connected to the edit.

In an off line environment a footprint may be stored in local temp files, when the owner of the computer has created some sort of keylogger situation, so the logs can be accessed by administrators and they will be able to view the actions done on that computer, and who did it.