And can it still be tracked if you don’t use your name or share any personal information?
In: Technology
Your digital footprint is essentially a web of different bits of information you leave behind that can be potentially connected to you. A big point of this is, connecting these bits of information across numerous sites or sources can create a profile much more clear and detailed than people realize. It can include information such as your searches in search engines, web pages visited/browsing history, opinions posted online, forum posts or accessible IMs, IPs used, online purchases, subscriptions, and personal information you share (such as name, address, emails, friends and family members you mention, etc).
If it’s possible to say, connect a place where you post your personal information, to a separate location where you post/search things you’d rather people not know, or another place where you have a non-personal handle, the latter two can be connected to the former even if you didn’t specifically use personal information for those sites. So, non-personal site activities can now be linked to a real name you never used on it, or an IP address that both accounts use. A lot of websites/advertisers attempt to track and build profiles of people, even if they’re incomplete or still somewhat anonymous, as it can mean a lot for building realistic customer datasets to work with, among other uses.
Digital foot print is just the name for anything you do on a electronic device that is saved in some way. How this is done depends very much. Now with your question about tracking I asume you just care about your digital foot print you leave online mostly on social media sites.
In theory yes nearly anything you do can be tracked if someone wanted to and had the resources.
Now to a realistic case of a normal user, if you dont share your name and any personal information (though it depends on what you define as personal information) it is unlikely that someone finds out who you are. But depending on how you use social media it is very possible that someone can link together multiple of your social media accounts like your twitter and your reddit account.
But this is independent of your digital footprint, your digital footprint exists even if no one can link it to you as a person. And it also often doesnt matter if you can link it to one person. If reddit wants to show you an ad they dont care what your name is but they care about what you do online.
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