Digital footprints-we all leave them everywhere. With this post I leave a digital dossier here, on edublogs. Even before my birth, I was photographed and information about me was shared with many different people. It has become inevitable to leave marks behind, can the amount and kind of information known about you ,though, be controlled by yourself?

Social media is an incredibly important point to mention when talking about digital footprints. Teenagers, adults, and nowadays young children are connected through different platforms like Instagram or Snapchat. Especially teenagers often give away way too much information about themselves. They post revealing pictures and tell strangers where they live. Everything they publish will stay on the internet, no matter their profile having been deleted. The internet knows it all! These footprints could then have major consequences later on in life. Your boss could find an old profile, with which you once, ages ago, expressed your bad feelings towards his company or posted pictures with loads of alcoholic beverages. This and much more could make you lose your job, just because you left a footprint, visible for everyone, behind.
Choosing to leave social media, to not share information about yourself publicly and to quit connections with your friends over the internet has become a hard thing to do, and just impossible for some. You cannot not leave marks behind, but you could certainly control the amount and kind of information that’s known about you. By not inviting to a house party via social media or posting revealing pictures of yourself, you decrease your personal information drastically. To completely shut down not only social media but your access to the internet, to stop taking pictures of yourself or even to quit sending postcards with personal information is near to impossible. Even I, who posts little to nothing on social media, could not live without Instagram, not to mention the internet by itself.
I mainly use the internet to seek information about historical or geographical things for example, but I’m also online to , in a way, spy on others. I’m interested to see what other people, whether that’s celebrities or friends, are up to. I don’t mind anyone knowing about the fact that I googled some youtuber’s twitter to check on his profile. I do not share much with the world, but enjoy the world sharing loads with me.

All in all, it’s inevitable to leave digital footprints, even if you’re able to control the amount and kind of information known about you. This, though, is still very hard these days as society has seduced so many to leave digital dossiers everywhere. I try to keep my things private and only post, search or tell things I don’t mind anyone knowing about.