Hello world,

I’m back but this time not from a post from PLP but from another course instead. My work got deleted on the other site so I became really mad and decided to use my blog to reflect my learning.

Anyways I just entered summer and am now participating in the Carrier Life Education Course and today we were talking about digital footprints.

First let’s define what a digital footprint is. Our digital foot print is the traces and presence we have left behind online. This presence is made of things from the things we have posted to the profiles websites track our data with. These pieces of data can be classified into invisible and visible. Visible data are things we know we have posted or sent and even things that were deleted can be considered visible. On the other hand, invisible data is information collected on us privately by websites, apps and even wifi services. These things we do online can also be ranked into 5 levels according to risk with 5 being the highest and 1 the lowest.

Now we understand what our digital footprint is, let’s talk about it’s importance. One thing to know is that our digital footprint doesn’t necessarily stay online and can even affect our social, academic and work lives. Our social lives especially nowadays revolve around technology wether it be social media, messaging services or calling but one thing to know is that what is uploaded to the internet can be permanent and having poor or inappropriate behaviour online can lead to one’s reputation being damaged. This behaviour can even get you kicked out of a job or  rejected from universities as many companies and post-secondary institutions check their applicants social media and other online activities. In fact there are many cases of celebrities having big scandals over posts when they were teens and this just shows how important our digital footprint can be.

Now you might think, how do I find these traces of myself one the internet which leads me into an activity we did today. We used a website called “Trace-my-shadow” to find out how many traces of ourselves are left on the internet. Click here to check out the website. After completing the survey I found that I had an amazing 113 traces online which is way above average.

You may wonder if I am worried about having such a big profile of me online but honestly, I don’t feel that bad. Yes my data is tracked but how else are most of the free websites and online services going to make money. Actually, I think most teenagers know their data is being tracked and recorded but don’t realize the effects it could have to them so to me, as long as I don’t do anything stupid or inappropriate, I don’t feel to worried about going online.

In the end, our digital footprint is like a shadow that follows us wherever we go. To not be aware of it is extremely worrying as previously explained the damages it can do to ones real life. A digital footprint can best be kept by checked by just thinking. Thinking about what you post, thinking about what you do, and thinking about the websites we visit. I hope that you have learnt something about digital footprints as much as I did, see you in the next post.