digital footprint

Digital footprint

Definition of Digital Footprint

An individual’s digital footprint is all the information about this individual that can be tracked or found online. This information is for example found on publicly accessible social media platforms. This footprint includes publicly accessible data and it therefore differs from for example a digital profile or the history of someone’s browser.

Implications of commitment to digital footprint

The digital footprint of an individual is an important thing to consider before engaging in online activity. Studies have shown that even with little information, many things about an individual can be learned. The famous example of this is a research with Facebook likes (Chen et al. (2019)). In this study the authors showed that an individual’s decisions could be predicted based on their Facebook likes. After a certain amount of likes, the algorithm of the researchers could predict the behavior of the subject better than personal friends or even life partners. As this digital footprint thus allows for very accurate predictions of a person’s behavior, it is important to take this into account when sharing personal information about yourself online.
AI engineers could use digital footprints of individuals to train models and to access information. They should take into account that while this is a powerful method, the online representation of people is not always a fair or accurate one. People often share a more positive part of their life on social media accounts. This could impact studies that use posts of individuals to predict moods or other sociology aspects.

#comment/Anderson digital footprints are also an issue of personal safety, especially for people personally targeted for violence. They can be used by stalkers to finder your location:

Societal transformations required for addressing concerns raised by digital footprints

In order to deal with the large amount of data that can be found on individuals online, there are multiple requirements. The first requirement is more education and awareness on the power that these footprints hold. People are not always aware of how little information about them can already result in accurate predictions (as has been shown in the Facebook example). The responsibility for creating this awareness could either be on a government level, or on the level of social media platforms. A second requirement is one that is important for the organizations or researchers that process or use these digital footprints. They should keep the potential differences between online and offline behavior in mind, possibly requesting the help of sociologists on the topic.