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 and internet privacy

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. Tony Fish [1] calls the process of collecting, storing, analysing the data to create value My Digital Footprint In Fish's book Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page). 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.

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