Lesson about the digital footprint, data theft, metadata, personally identifying information (PII)
Last updated
Was this helpful?
Just as you leave footprints in the sand when you stroll along a beach, when you operate online you leave a digital trail laden with information. And just as your tracks on the beach can provide clues to an observer, like how tall you are, what you weigh, which direction you were going and how fast you were traveling, the data you leave behind you every single time you access the internet contains identifying personal information.
Let’s take a closer look at two types of data that you leave behind in your ‘digital footprint’. The first is ‘your data’ and the second is ‘data about you’, otherwise known as metadata.
In Module 1, we unpacked common examples of what intermediaries consider ‘your data’: the personal information you willingly disclose, like your name and email address, as well as content you post on social-media platforms, emails you send, photos you share, queries you search for, text messages you send, and so on. In short, your data includes your personal information plus anything you actively upload or enter. Most people consider this type of data to be the most important to preserve when it comes to their online privacy.
However, we must also take active steps to protect our metadata—the less-considered data that we leave behind as we navigate through cyber space—if we are serious about our online privacy. This metadata, or ‘about you’ data, is highly valuable to corporate intermediaries and other entities who seek to profit from, restrict or predict your activities.
Metadata includes patterns, insights or other user behavior information that intermediaries gather while you use online services.
Let’s say you post a photo of you and your partner having a coconut on a beach. “Your data” in this case includes the text you wrote, your public profile on the service where you posted the picture, the photo you uploaded, etc. However, a service like Facebook collects and stores not only the information you’ve provided them (your data), but also the metadata surrounding this post: the date and time of posting and all the information constantly leaking from your device, including but not limited to your , , (check out ), and .
But how do “they” get my metadata?
Devices can leak your precise location even if you turn off location services, do not have a SIM card and do not even have any apps installed. Google & Co are known to map IP addresses, wifi connection points and mobile towers, so they know where a device is connecting or attempting to connect even without using the phone’s location service. Read it straight from Apple’s privacy policy: “Where available, location-based services may use GPS, Bluetooth, and your IP Address, along with crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower locations, and other technologies to determine your devices’ approximate location.”
Android phones ship with barometric devices that can read local air pressure and even calculate the floor a user is on in a multi-story building.
If you carry a smart device with you, you need to understand that it is constantly broadcasting data about you and where you are to the device manufacturer, the operating system developer and the developers of any apps you have installed.
To give you a sense of how much data your devices broadcast about you, read about a recent investigation by Oracle that discovered that Google harvests as much as a gigabyte of user data per month from and about users of Google’s Android devices!
In Modules 3-8, we’ll discuss the steps you can take to minimize collection of your metadata. The purpose of this lesson is to highlight that corporations and other entities collect both data and metadata about you when you operate online.
Key Questions:
What are the two types of information that constitute your digital footprint?
Provide two examples of each.
