Digital Footprint - Privacy Issues

Privacy Issues

Digital footprints are not a digital identity or passport, but the meta data collected impacts upon internet privacy, trust, security, digital reputation, and recommendation. As the digital world expands and integrates with more aspects of life, ownership and rights of data becomes important. Digital footprints are controversial in that privacy and openness are in competition. Scott McNealy said in 1999 Get Over It when referring to privacy on the internet, becoming a commonly used quote in relationship to private data and what companies do with it.

While a digital footprint can be used to infer personal information without their knowledge, it also exposes individuals private psychological sphere into the social sphere (see Bruno Latour's article (Latour 2007)). Lifelogging is an example of indiscriminate collection of information concerning an individuals life and behaviour (Kieron, Tuffield & Shadbolt 2009).