Your ‘digital footprint’ contains all your online activity, from browsing sites through to posting comments. Every account you have created, email sent, image posted, or location tagged. will add to your footprint and once created, in many cases, is very difficult to remove. In effect it becomes your online reputation, which can impact how others view you offline.
The chances are that at some stage, someone will conduct an online search for you, possibly a future employer and what they find will influence them positively or negatively. So, before they do, it is important that you manage it, especially if having looked yourself, you are not happy with it.
Generally, footprints fall into one of two categories, passive and active. ‘Passive’ footprints are those that are left behind when you visit a website and are automatically collected often through the use of that website’s cookies. Usually they will be collecting information about how many times you have visited in the recent past, pages viewed, links clicked, time spent on the site etc.
‘Active’ footprints, consist of the information you have consciously and deliberately left behind via posts and images you have uploaded, comments you have made on forums and groups, the people and companies you have elected to follow and newsletters you have subscribed to. All these would be typical examples of where you are actively building your digital footprint.
What can you do about it
Often, it’s not possible to completely disconnect from the internet, as amongst other things, you may want to use it to keep in touch with people, especially if they are geographically dispersed. Whilst you cannot completely delete your digital footprint, you can (a) reduce it and (b) proactively manage it, thereby protecting it.
Using several reference sources, this post covers 8 tenets on how to reduce the unnecessary content that either doesn’t support your professional profile and/or reduces the risk of your profile being hacked and used against you.
- Do an online search
Search for yourself using multiple search engines on your first and last name, plus common misspellings and other names you go under or have gone under to see what comes up. If anything comes up that you don’t like, see how you can get it removed.
- Audit all your accounts
Conduct an audit of all the accounts or profiles that you have created online including emails, especially old ones. If you don’t use them, delete or deactivate them, to reduce the risk of a breach, as they may still contain personal and financial information. If they just sit there idle, you may not notice if the account has been compromised.
- Remove yourself from data collection sites
Like point 2, to prevent excess data about you remaining online, start unsubscribing from mailing lists so that the number of third parties that have your information is reduced. Periodically check back to make sure that your request has been actioned and that you haven’t been added back on.
- Double-check your privacy settings, but don’t trust them
Security setting and privacy options often change, especially on social networking sites. To ensure that you are not inadvertently sharing private information with the wrong groups, periodically review all of your accounts to make sure only the people you want to see your information are the ones seeing it.
- Create strong memorable passwords
Create passwords that use a combination of words, numbers, symbols and upper- and lowercase letters. Make it something that is easy for you to recall but hard for others to break.
- Keep all your software up to date
Many viruses and malware programmes are specifically designed to ‘mine’ your digital footprint and are constantly being updated. Protect yourself by making sure that your antivirus software and other software programmes are up to date.
- Use stealth or incognito mode
Most browsers have a way where you can set your browsing to private which can help prevent websites from tracking you. You can also use a Virtual Private Network which encrypts all data that you send and receive over the internet.
- Disable location tracking
Location tracking allows you to get location-based suggestions on your searches for businesses in your area. Though convenient, it can pose a security risk if you allow your location to be tracked all of the time. Be sure you are aware of which apps and services have access to your location and that the location is only being tracked while using the service.
If you do find information that you would like to remove, but not too sure how, these two links may help:
How to ask Google to remove your personal data from its search results
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/11080680?hl=en
How to remove web results from Google Search
Look out for Part 2, covering how you can proactively manage your footprint.
If you would like to find out more about this topic, contact us to book your free 90 minute personal 1:1 career consultation: