"there are several ways to ensure your digital footprint doesn't damage your reputation, or any future employment opportunities

We all leave digital footprints and with every new profile, photo or comment we add new ones. People that you know, and people you don’t, can learn a lot from them. Do you know what yours say about you?

Your footprints can show you at your very best or very worst. Lots of people, like Kent teenager Paris Brown, are finding out that our posts can have serious consequences long after we’ve forgotten them.

This is one reason why to use most sites you can share information on you need to be over 13. If you’re under 13 you shouldn’t be using them.

Remember, if you have posted something you regret - it’s never too late to take control.

We all leave digital footprints and with every new profile, photo or comment we add new ones. People that you know, and people you don’t, can learn a lot from them. Do you know what yours say about you?

Your footprints can show you at your very best or very worst. Lots of people, like Kent teenager Paris Brown, are finding out that our posts can have serious consequences long after we’ve forgotten them.

This is one reason why to use most sites you can share information on you need to be over 13. If you’re under 13 you shouldn’t be using them.

Remember, if you have posted something you regret - it’s never too late to take control.

Digital footprints are sometimes broken down into active and passive data traces. Active data traces are the ones that the user leaves intentionally. Facebook, Twitter and blog posts, social network connections, image and video uploads, email, phone calls and chats are among the ways people create active digital footprints. 

Passive data traces connected to an individual are left by others or gathered through activities that the user does without purposefully putting out data. Website visits and actions, searches and online purchases are among the activities that add passive data traces to a digital footprint. 

A digital footprint is relatively permanent and once the data is public -- or even semi-public, as may be the case with Facebook posts -- the owner has little control over how it will be used by others. For that reason, a major focus of digital footprint management (DFM) is caution about online activities to control the data that can be gathered in the first place. 

There are two main classifications for digital footprints: passive and active. A passive digital footprint is created when data is collected without the owner knowing (also known as data exhaust), whereas active digital footprints are created when personal data is released deliberately by a user for the purpose of sharing information about oneself by means of websites or social media.^[5]

Tony Fish expounded upon the possible dangers of digital footprints in a 2007 self-published book.^[6] The closed loop takes data from the open loop and provides this as a new data input. This new data determines what the user has reacted to, or how they have been influenced. The feedback then builds a digital footprint based on social data, and the controller of the social digital footprint data can determine how and why people purchase and behave.

Katalin Fehér emphasised in her academic research paper about personal online strategies in 2017^[7] that users leave digital footprints behind via online systems and new media. Human interactions and digitalized automatization imply decisions and dilemmas on account of online participation. The consequences are unpredictable: both former and updated records are available in an infinite digital present.