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.
One of the first references to a digital footprint was by Nicholas Negroponte, naming it the slug trail in his book Being Digital in 1996. John Battelle called digital footprints the clickstream exhaust, while Tim O'Reilly and Esther Dyson titled it the data exhaust. 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 Shadow
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