Description
The activities and behaviours recorded may include system login and logouts, visits to a web-page, accessed or created files, emails, chat messages or any other material showing the activities undertaken. Some of this material may be available publicly to anyone searching for it while other material may be inaccessible without access rights or, for some kinds of data that are not usually available publicly, legal action. Interested parties can use data they have found for evidence, data mining or profiling purposes.
Digital footprints have been referred to as "clickstream exhaust" by John Battelle and data exhaust by Tim O'Reilly and Esther Dyson. Early usage of the term focused on information left by web activity alone, but came to represent data created and consumed by all devices and sensors.
Read more about this topic: Digital Footprint
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“Why does philosophy use concepts and why does faith use symbols if both try to express the same ultimate? The answer, of course, is that the relation to the ultimate is not the same in each case. The philosophical relation is in principle a detached description of the basic structure in which the ultimate manifests itself. The relation of faith is in principle an involved expression of concern about the meaning of the ultimate for the faithful.”
—Paul Tillich (1886–1965)
“Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)