My Digital Footprint from LLWW
During my course of study on Living, Learning and Working on the Web, I felt the realisation of leaving our digital footprint behind on the web will affect us and other people whether it’s in digital world or real world. Digital footprint is information about us as person that exists on the Internet as a result of our online activity such as posting update on social media to having professional resume and account on job search website. Our digital footprints are links to our privacy and in turn, connected to all our information that defines our digital identity. Information that ranges from our name to where we been to our banking account, information which are mostly control and store by a third party company such as Facebook and Twitter (Arvidsson & Colleoni 2012). If these information were to be hack and access by those choose to take advantages of us, we could be left expose and vulnerable. Even though protecting our privacy against hackers are generally knowledge, but how much do we really know the extent of protection against this threat. This led back to social media company privacy policy that we have given permission to access our details, again by our own free-will from accepting their term and condition. These details are also valuable data for social medial company as they get the full benefits sell ad spaces on their pages for other company. Even the blogging platforms where we have written our blogs and comments and our classes on Facebook are footprints we leave for anyone to use and access.
With our current contemporary society, the footprint we left behind can be easily access by an intruder. Krotoski (2016) documentary demonstrate that hackers can easily infiltrate our personal devices such as laptop by simply sending out email in the name of known associate. This example was done simply by the hacker accessing Dr Krotoski Linkin account and search known associate email, sent email in the associate name with page to link, which in turn led to giving hacker permission to access to all of Dr Krotoski information on her laptop (Krotoski 2016). We must be aware of what we posting online as they can be used against us just like the example show in Krotoski (2016) documentary. As we increasing our online activity, the more footprints we will leave behind and thus making the process of finding our information easier (Siegel 2016). This is especially since the footprints are not bound by one geographically or legality of nation (León 2015). As the internet is shared all over the world, only a few companies such as Google and Facebook will have most of our data. These giants social media company also shared our information with other industries through selling advertising spaces on their pages for other economic industries (León 2015). Not only is our digital footprints can be used against us by hackers but also by large social media company as well.
My digital footprint was especially visible to me when searching for a new car prior to researching “Digital Footprints”. I put keywords such as ‘digital footprint’ or ‘digital data’ in the search box and browsed through a couple of websites, mostly going back and forth to Google. Besides links to informative Wikipedia articles and newspaper debates on societal implications of digital world and digital footprints, a range of commercial links were presented to me in the sponsored search results. This link of advertisement about cars mainly appears on either of the columns of the page or top of the page. Tightly intertwined with my earlier interest and my current location, different types of cars were advertised to me and these commercial were haunting me throughout the webs for a couple days until my main search topics is ‘digital footprint’ and adverts are now regarding ‘cyber security’. The person need for information on searching platform such as Google transformed that data into the customer needed desired, which they are trying to satisfy the both the buyer and the seller (Mager 2012). These also evolve our economy into digital economy (León 2015).
Digital economies are practices through selling ads space by social media and search engine platform (Mager 2012). This done by potential advertisers bidding on how much they would like to pay to appear on top of sponsored platform (Mager 2012), such as Facebook or Google Search. Search results in relation to individually chosen search terms in the search engine (Dumeresque 2013), such as example previously mention like cars. This is also increased by cost-per-click advertisements to partner websites through its AdSense program, which allowed advertisers to relate their advertisements to a website’s content (Dumeresque 2013).
These factors that I had learned over the past few months had led my fellow student and I to choose campaign of rising awareness regrading digital footprints. The campaign was called “Unveiling Networks: Under the Influence”, where we would try to educated our audience influence of social media and what we do on it can affect us later on in life. Our audience was targeted at all those who use social media. This is to educate them about the digital footprints that are left behind. The education by done by informing what the data are used for, where do they used it on and that all the website are collecting data no matter what we are on. Ironically, we must accept that the social-media platform is so large and widely utilized, and that the footprints that we will leave behind for the audience to raised awareness, our campaign are on social platform as well.
Thus, upon beginning my learning Living, Learning and Working on the Web to the end, I believe the digital footprints that we had left behind on Facebook classes and blogging platforms will be later use by someone that we never seen or met before whether in person or digitally. This someone may manipulate our data and take advantages or take positive of what we had contributed in cyber-world.
Reference
Arvidsson, A & Colleoni, E 2012, ‘Value in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet’, The Information Society, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 135–150.
Dumeresque, D 2013, ‘The corporate digital footprint: exactly who owns and controls it? The emergence of the digital director’, Strategic Direction, Vol. 29, no. 7, pp. 34–36.
León, LFA 2015, ‘The Digital Economy and Variegated Capitalism’, Canadian Journal of Communication, vol. 40, pp. 637–654.
Mager, A 2012, ‘Algorithm Ideology’, Information, Communication & Society, vol. 15, №5, pp. 769–787.
Siegel, D 2016, ‘Manage Your Client’s Digital Footprint’, Trial, vol. 52, no. 7, pp. 66.
