What is a digital footprint?

and how does it impact your life or the lives of others?

Welcome to Uncommon Thinking. I’ve been considering a separate section of The Writing Shed for the occasional essays I write, I even debated creating a brand new Substack but decided that involved too much extra work. So here it is, and if you only want to receive my writing prompts you can click the Unsubscribe button at the bottom of this email and turn off this section. I’ll be sad if you decide to do that, but will understand as may not want unwanted essays dropping into your nice tidy inbox. Just to say though, they will be occasional, maybe at most once a month, but probably not.

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I have a smartphone, a laptop, and a PC. On these devices, I make and take phone calls, send and receive messages and email. I access the web to search for information, write documents and then save them on my devices or online. I take photographs, download images, and use them here on Substack. I watch videos and television, listen to podcasts, sign documents and petitions. I host workshops, make recordings, and create ‘content’. I am connected to a digital lifeline, not quite 24/7 because I have a habit of turning everything off every night, but for much of the time every day.

Each one of these actions leaves a mark, a footprint in the sand if you like, that can be tracked, traced and used to build a picture of who I am. It won’t be accurate because it’s only part of the story, but it tells those organisations that do this work enough about me to build a picture they can sell back to me through advertising. They can also share it, for a price, with others who want to target my interests in some way, and that’s the nicer end of the digital footprint world.

With this sort of information, it is possible to tell how likely I am to vote and who I might vote for, it gives insight into my economic status, the way I view my job or role in society, how likely I may be to support a Government initiative, what worries me, excites me, or interests me. As Matt Bailey put it in a conversation with Stéphane Hamel ”.. the current assumption in the (advertising) industry is that everyone else owns your data and you can’t control anything about it.¹

In 2018 I was sufficiently concerned about the impact of a digital footprint on my privacy I made plans to extricate myself from the worst offenders for data mining and exploitation. It was not as easy as you might think. It took four and a half years, a lot of heartache, and the acceptance that I would lose data, documents and information in the process.

And, in 2023 I got caught up in two prominent phishing attacks, the first through a pension provider, and the second was The British Library. Both attacks released sensitive data onto the dark web requiring me to make some pretty fundamental changes to the identification data used by my bank.

Since I began, I have removed myself from most social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram (which I’d never used much), YouTube and, in 2023, LinkedIn. In 2020, I began the painful process of taking myself out of as much of the Google and Microsoft spheres of influence as possible when using an Android phone and a Windows laptop.

I no longer consented to be surveilled across multiple services. I no longer wanted to be told what to think, how to think, or where to do it. In other words, I didn’t want to be governed, perhaps a better term might be controlled. In other words, I opted out of the all-seeing algorithm. It is still there lurking in the background of my habits and actions in the transactional information I can only control when using cash. But that’s fine, I accept it as the inevitability of living in 21st-century Western culture.

Throughout the process, I regularly questioned why I was putting myself through this hell, because at times it felt like that as the tentacles are strong, long, and everywhere, even in the most unlikely of places.

Was it worth it? After all, I’m still online, still visible to the digital world here on Substack. And my data is still being used by organisations to target me with email and spam.

But the simple answer is Yes, it was worth it.

My ability to seek out information more relevant to my needs is the outcome of all the effort and significantly supports decisions I make relating to important topics. Without access to information about who I am, the algorithms cannot work so whenever I search, wherever I search I see a clean set of data. It may seem like a small benefit, but the act of taking back that power has enormous implications not just for me, but if replicated across millions of like-minded people, it could be world-changing.

So what is a digital footprint?

The simplest explanation is that your digital footprint is just like your DNA. As Stéphane Hamel put it ”.. there’s a unique sequence of attributes that represent your digital DNA. Your unique you. It’s a unique combination, but it’s supposed to be anonymous...“² except it isn’t!

In 2023 I ran a series of workshops designed to help ordinary people like me understand what it really means to be connected in the digital world. The aim wasn’t to change what participants did, rather it was to help them understand the consequences of how they show up online. Once anyone has that knowledge, they can make decisions about what they are prepared to compromise on, or not.

Without that knowledge, everyone is subject to the fickle winds of technology to decide what should be read, bought, watched, and even where to go, live or work.

A digital footprint is not just in the services we use, or the devices we work on, it is the essence of our life online and is updated by every link we click, every update we like, each item we buy, and the apps and services we download and use. We like to think we are free to make these decisions for ourselves but the truth is that they are often made by the algorithms which have assessed us and found us wanting. Every single ‘service’ used carves a little more information off the prime cut of our lives and personalities. And when most sites or services are underpinned by the big tech giants it is they, rather than the small businesses which rely on them, that ultimately benefit.

If we take just one ‘useful’ web service Google Analytics, we can explore the disparity between the information gleaned by a small business vs a tech monolith. You may or may not have heard of it, either way, you will have been subject to its overreach almost every time you use a website, app or service.

Google Analytics allows marketers and businesses to track how their website or platform is used. It measures more than 200 metrics and dimensions about visitors to those self-same websites and platforms. In June 2024, W3 Techs³ reported that over 51% of all websites used some form of Google Analytics services, and of those websites which monitored traffic trends, it had an 83.3% market share. It claims not to sell your data, and if we take a literal definition of the word ‘sell’, it doesn’t. But it’s not true, because the data collected about you when you visit websites using a tool like Analytics is made available to marketers who want to target you directly.

When a business signs up to use any version of Google Analytics they agree that Google will process the data they collected on their behalf. If you aren’t sure what that means, read that sentence again more slowly so it sinks in.

The data collected includes items you might think are private like your email address if you log in, transaction values if you buy something, your social interactions, what you read and pay attention to and your online journey to the digital site of your choice. At the very least it will collect your IP address, the device you are using, your location, your browser type and operating system, the pages you view and the links you follow⁴ and it guestimates, usually with pretty good accuracy, your gender and age group. Of course, the information it knows about you is especially detailed if you happen to be a Gmail user who uses Chrome as your sole browser and an Android ‘phone.

Let’s say, for example, that you never reset your broadband router. Over an astonishingly short time, your IP address alone connects your activity to your identity. This is because an IP address is specific to a single broadband address. When you visit half a dozen websites and log in to three of them, all the data is collected and gathered providing an accurate picture of a person you may not even recognise as you, simply because so much of what we do online is unconscious.

Sites and services use analytics tools to understand more about their visitors, customers and users. Google aggregates that data across millions of websites and billions of data points and probably knows more about you than you know yourself.

This is the sharp end of your digital footprint. You may not worry about this level of intelligence gathering, you may feel that you’re too small a cog in an enormous wheel and that your data doesn’t matter. But, when your data is combined with the data of everyone else patterns emerge that can predict cultural shifts. These can then be changed by using a series of ‘nudges’. This is how the dystopian nightmare we watch on films and TV emerges that has everyone under constant surveillance. It is what moves society away from the rule of law that says someone is innocent until proven guilty, to the very opposite. It is what allows the reality of biology to be superseded by the fakery of a worldview that tells us, everyone is exactly the same.

Although there are other analytics tools available, Google has by a huge margin, the largest share across the three tools that make up its platform at 74.53% in 2023⁵. Facebook has a paltry 6.48% market share, and Monster Insights has 2.85%. The remaining 16.1% is taken up by the hundreds of other services a website owner could choose to use. What these figures mean is related to the number of web users at any given time. On the 31^st January 2024, Simon Kemp of Data Reportal estimated that 5.35 billion people were using the internet, that’s around 66.2% of the world’s total population⁶.

If you don’t believe this is concerning, imagine a single organisation being able to influence 3.98 billion people, almost half of the entire population, simply because of what it knows about each of them. This reach transcends borders, negates national politics, and bypasses democratic processes by reaching straight into the heart of your home.

This ability is concerning at the macro level, but what about the micro level - the level of the individual? And, what happens when this technology is used by malicious actors to target specific individuals? Researchers in 2018 demonstrated that not only was it possible if you had someone’s email address, they were also able to infer other data such as phone numbers remarkably accurately⁷.

Advertising platforms such as Google AdWords and Facebook Ads, allow users to upload custom audiences drawn from data the business already has. For example, Company A has a database of people’s first names and email addresses which is common. They upload that data to Google AdWords. Google combines this information with the information they already have on these email addresses through Google Analytics and other Google products such as Gmail. When complete the advertiser can send a message on any website participating in advertising programmes to a subset of the people whose email addresses were uploaded that meets a specific requirement.

What could possibly go wrong?

.. and breathe

Many people I work with are understandably concerned about what their digital footprint might have revealed. I usually suggest they bear in mind that some footprints, like those left in wet sand on a beautiful beach, are only visible for a brief time, before they are swept away by changing tides. This is your footprint to date, it does not have to be your footprint going forwards so you can breathe easily knowing that simple changes will affect what information is stored, and for how long.

So what can you do about it?

Without abandoning the digital world altogether, which is increasingly difficult in Western cultures, the aim is to make yourself less visible and trackable, whilst remembering the adage that if it’s free, you’re the product.

Change one thing at a time. Every single action is incremental and, over time, will significantly reduce how much a single organisation might know or infer about you. The following are my four quick tips:

1. Turning off your broadband router at night means your IP address changes regularly and although your broadband provider still knows it’s you, most others won’t. Switching off your mobile phone has a similar effect, albeit with the caveat that you will log into the device and provider when you restart it.

2. Adding a VPN to your devices means you are less visible and also allows you to access content censored by your Government.

3. Using a minimum of two different email addresses, one for newsletters and another for online accounts helps obfuscate your activity and provides a simple first line of security against scammers.

4. Changing email providers from the ultra-exposed to the more secure helps remove the repository of information you’ve been saving about yourself in your sent mail and inbox. Some will also help you create multiple secure email addresses that easily find their way back to your main account.

5. Using a different web browser which doesn’t track your activity, is perhaps the easiest way to ensure you get a clean set of search results next time you want to find out about those symptoms you’ve got, or where to go on holiday. I started recommending Duck Duck Go to friends in 2010 and today, I use it in combination with Brave.

These are just a few simple changes you can make immediately. There are many others but it’s impossible to list them all in a single post, but over time, I’ll share more here on Uncommon Thoughts. I’ll also share more about what I’ve done, why and how my inbox rarely receives anything I don’t want, and how I’m never troubled by online ads.

(Image by Ulrike Mai from Pixabay

1. https://www.sitelogicmarketing.com/podcast-privacy-data-analytics/

2. https://www.sitelogicmarketing.com/podcast-privacy-data-analytics/

3. https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/ta-googleanalytics

4. https://www.simpleanalytics.com/blog/how-does-google-analytics-collect-data

5. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1258557/web-analytics-market-share-technology-worldwide/

6. https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2024-global-overview-report

7. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8418598