What is an Online or Digital Footprint: Definition and Examples

An online digital footprint is a digital history and reputation that follows you whenever you interact with anything online. It includes all your social media posts, comments, likes, shares, images, videos, blog posts, and more.

An online digital footprint is essentially what others see when they look you up online or view your social media accounts. Since you may not want specific people seeing every detail of your private life, it’s important to monitor your online presence.

What is a Digital Footprint?

As the name suggests, a digital footprint is the long-term collection of digital data that someone leaves behind when using the Internet. You may also see it phrased as an online digital record. Digital footprint examples can include everything from a person’s email address to their social media posts, comments, and website visits.

Your digital footprint is essential for finding employment, maintaining professional relationships, and even finding a place to live. While having a positive digital footprint is important, there is only so much you can do to change any online information from your past.

Active Digital Footprints

Active digital footprints include everything a user shares on purpose. Whenever you interact with content or post your own, you add to your active digital footprint. This includes actions you do on autopilot, like “double tap” liking an Instagram post.

Your active footprint is what most employers, friends, and other contacts will see. Some less apparent contributors are subscribing to a newsletter, accepting cookies, and even adding sites to your bookmark bar. Basically, if you make a choice, then it’s part of your active footprint.

Passive Digital Footprints

Passive digital footprints encompass everything outside of a user’s control. Websites, ISPs, and browsers are constantly collecting information on people. This includes user IP addresses, interests, and time spent on certain pages. Without knowing it, you’re continually feeding into your passive digital footprint. This makes it much harder to control.

Marketing teams and social media sites rely heavily on all this information. Part of passive digital footprints involves the hidden calculations that combine all active and passive actions that inform advertisers what they should be selling you.

What Contributes to Your Online Footprint?

Every device you use with an internet connection contributes to your digital footprint. This means phones, laptops, tablets, and smartwatches are constantly developing your footprint by tracking the following:

• E-Commerce Shopping
• Coupon Hunting
• Browser Extension Downloads
• Using Numerous Shopping Apps
• Frequenting Dating Sites
• Signing Up for Newsletters
• Web vs. Application Banking
• Social Media
• Keeping Up with the News
• Fitness Engagement

These are just a few examples, but the list of factors is limitless. Additionally, the tone of how you interact with each of these is also essential.

How is a Digital Footprint Different Than an Online Reputation?

The basic digital footprint definition is a record of who you are and what you do online. Your digital footprint can be your social media posts, email addresses, websites, and other electronic footprints that trace your digital activity. 

An online reputation is the public perception of you or your business. It's the collection of all the information people have about you—from your website to job references to professional certifications. Your online reputation can be positive or negative, and it can significantly impact how people view you. 

A digital footprint is a lot more accessible than an online reputation. Anyone can access your digital footprint if they know where to look. It’s much easier for someone to damage your online reputation than it is for them to damage your digital footprint, which is hidden on the internet behind passwords and security measures.

What Outsiders Can Do with Your Online Data

When sharing information online, you should also consider who else can access it. Once you post something online, it can be easily accessed and even republished elsewhere. 

Whatever you post online, outsiders have access to. These breadcrumbs of information about you add up to a more complete profile about who you are. People can look through items like pictures you post, comments you make, and locations you talk about to gather a lot of information about you. Consider the fact that you may have information like this online: 

• Your name
• The town you live in
• If you are married or not, and to whom if you are
• How many kids you have
• Your political stance
• Your favorite restaurants
• Names of your pets
• Favorite vacation destinations
• Your birthday
• And so much more

If you are like most people, some combination of this information will lead a hacker to your passwords for many of your important accounts. Usually, a hacker would use a high-power computer to guess every combination of letters and numbers until they got their target’s password right. This is known as a brute force attack.

However, hackers know that people love weak and quickly recalled passwords. Pet owners commonly use their dog’s name for a password, or older people use a family member’s birthday. Knowing your personal information reduces the number of combinations they must guess by thousands of trillions.

It’s not just lost accounts you need to worry about, either. When bad actors get this information from your digital footprint, they can also create more plausible phishing scams for you. Instead of being approached by a Nigerian prince, you’ll get text messages asking you to donate to a charity for the illness that killed your grandmother.

Why is Monitoring Your Digital Footprint Important?

You may be surprised at what people find when they look your name up online. Your digital footprint is a treasure trove of information that potential employers, landlords, and others can use to find out more about you. 

A quick online search of your name might even lead people to information that dates back to childhood or even your high school days. Unfortunately, it may also include information about you that is either outdated or completely incorrect. 

It’s important to monitor your online presence so that you can remove or edit incorrect information whenever possible. An online digital footprint may also be called an online reputation or electronic reputation.

How to Monitor Your Online Footprint

There are several ways to monitor your digital footprint. First, you can also use Google Alerts to keep an eye on how you are discussed online. The alerts will send you emails when new content about you is published. 

Next, you can also use social media to keep track of your reputation. If you have a public social media profile, you can set up notifications to receive emails whenever someone comments on your posts. Notifications allow you to respond quickly to any negative comments or reviews. 

You can also use social media to your advantage by posting positive content about your life. For example, you can post stories about volunteering in your community on your social media channels. These stories help boost your positive digital footprint or can help bury a negative digital footprint under posts that show improvements in your life. They may also bring new opportunities to light to help expand your reach.

Building a Better Digital Footprint

Forming the right mindset online is the most crucial part of building a better digital footprint. Obviously, everyone should veer away from spreading hateful commentary and ideas. But there's more to a great digital footprint than just staying out of trouble.

Here are our most effective tips for building a more positive online footprint!

Consider Future Opportunities

Think about where you want your life to go. The term "positive" will vary depending on the person's life. It may not be important that you maintain a squeaky-clean image. People may appreciate a little brusqueness or candidness in your online activity.

You may have yet to plan the next forty years, but you probably have a general idea of the big things.

• Do you want to stay involved with the church?
• Do you want to work for a conscientious company?
• Do you want to start your own business in the future?
• What kind of atmosphere do your social circles have?
• What should your online interests reflect?

Questions like these will help you build a beneficial digital footprint. We recommend playing it safe if you need help figuring out what to ask yourself. Avoid speaking on inflammatory subjects, and keep your complaining to a minimum.

Stay Positive About Your Interests

This tip sounds like something that would happen naturally. You'd expect to respond positively to things that align with your interests.

However, many fans are tough on the things they love. It comes from a desire to see the niche improve in the future. For example, TV show fans often go on tirades about how a single episode "ruined" the season.

Use positive reaction emojis and keep your content constructive. This will inform your online footprint that you're invested and passionate in the subject. You can even take it further and create more time-intensive content on your interests.

Activities like writing blog posts, starting fan pages, or creating artwork go a long way in altering your online footprint.

Remember the Permanence of Screenshots and Recordings

Deleting posts that negatively impact your online footprint isn't the end of things. Unfortunately, screenshots and recordings allow your past to live on indefinitely.

People constantly save content they think is funny, jarring, or memorable to their phones. Apple even introduced a screen recording program as one of its pre-installed applications. This is terrible news for anyone with something to hide. 

However, unless you have a particularly egregious post, one bad screenshot isn't going to ruin your digital footprint. It only becomes a problem when they flock together to change the actual narrative of your online activity.

How Search Engines & Social Media Monitor Your Online Activity

When you search for someone on the Internet, you may be redirected to their social media pages or other sites that host their content. This is because search engines like Google use algorithms to determine how relevant a piece of information is. 

Social media sites like Facebook and Instagram monitor your online behaviors. Each of these sites has a way of determining what information is relevant and what is not. The sites often remove posts that they deem inappropriate and others flag as inappropriate.

All of this is based on machine learning using ranking signals. These signposts determine if the content meets the minimum requirements to pique a user’s interest. Ranking signals will get gradually more specific until they pinpoint the optimum content to display.

To accomplish this, social media sites use machine learning to analyze your past activity, otherwise known as your digital footprint.

For example, let’s say most of the Instagram accounts you follow involve animals. This creates an interest in your digital footprint that you’re most drawn in by animal content. Next, Instagram might see that most of those animal accounts are rescue operations or adoption pages. It’ll then direct your feed to display more sympathetic or emotional images.

Most social media sites work the same way with some minute changes. By taking advantage of your digital footprint, platforms can better direct you to advertisements with higher conversion chances.

In addition to curating your feed and advertisements, social media makes it easier for others to “read” your digital footprint.

When you post information to sites like Facebook and Twitter, the search engines will index your post to be easily accessible. This means that the search engine will store the post and make it easily searchable through their website. When you tag someone in a post or upload an image with someone else, the search engines will also store this information.

You are furthering your online reputation when you engage in activities like tagging people in posts, using keywords in your bios, posting images that have geo-locations, and using hashtags.

Your Digital Footprint Says a Lot About You

When you are online, you leave digital footsteps that others can see. Your online presence could include everything from your social media posts to your online reviews and more. The length of digital history you have varies but can date back years. 

Be careful what you post, comment on, and search for online. The last thing you want is to comment on a post in jest, only to have it cost you a job in the future. For help monitoring your digital footprint, consider investing in identity monitoring services. That way, you’re aware of any inaccurate information about you online. Plus, you can get alerts should anyone try to use information from your digital footprint!