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:
“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)
“It is possibleindeed possible even according to the old conception of logicto give in advance a description of all true logical propositions. Hence there can never be surprises in logic.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (18891951)
“The Sage of Toronto ... spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a global village instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacles present vulgarity.”
—Guy Debord (b. 1931)