Course 2: Digital Footprint – or Digital “Fingerprint”?
Essential question: “When and where should we be teaching students about their digital footprint?”
Let’s get this out right up front. The whole concept of a digital “footprint” is a misnomer.
Like the footprints left behind on a beach, a trail of digital cookies can show where you’ve been – but more often, they may be used to determine who you are rather than where – and this, it seems to me, is the real question. It’s more the case of leaving digital fingerprints than digital footprints.
For an overview of some of the ways you may never have considered that you’re developing a digital fingerprint, watch the first video link in Jen & Bob Farr’s “Farr-Out Links to Learning”.
Of course, where you’ve been speaks volumes about who you are, but by promoting this simple shift in thinking, we might help kids to maintain their sense of personal privacy for just a bit longer. Although kids often want to advertise where they are, so they can hook up, either virtually or in reality, most kids try to protect who they are much more vigorously. Unfortunately, they often don’t stop to consider that every bit of data they give up without a thought is etching yet another whorl into their digital fingerprint.
It’s never too young. As soon as kids begin to establish a presence online – that probably is, as soon as they learn to access the internet under their own logon, it’s time to begin teaching them what this really means. And in the end, if they’re going to be out there anyway, then why not help them put their best foot forward as soon as possible.
Some options?
- Help kids- at just about any level – find out more about digital footprints at the Discovery Channel’s “Your Digital Footprint“.
- Introduce older kids to the suggestions at “Marketing Monday” on improving one’s digital footprint.
- As a parent, consider signing up for one of the emerging “sanitizer” sites like “Reputation Defender“, on behalf of your child. This is a paid service, which claims that it, “scours the Internet for all references to your child or teen – by name, photography, screen name, or social network profiles – and packages it to you in an easy-to-understand report. Worried about bullies? Concerned that your teens’ friends and peers are posting inappropriate materials online? MyChild searches every corner of the Internet for traces of your kids. If you want to help your teen manage their online reputation, but have felt powerless to do so, ReputationDefender is your answer!”
BUT – beware of EVERYTHING online that offers to protect privacy. As with your own “digital footprint”, everything ever put out there is still there. A site with the billing “Consumer Protection:Step Carefully: Covering Digital Footprint Is Key to Web Privacy“, hosted by the Credit Union National Association, Inc., which certainly sounds legitimate, and which shows a copyright date of 2009, still makes the following recommendation;
- Try “Browzar.” A new Web search engine called Browzar might be a Web visitor’s best friend. The site acts as an online vacuum cleaner that removes Internet caches, histories, cookies, and online autoforms (the online tool that anticipates the Web address or search engine term based on data you’ve previously entered online and is stored on the browser).
Unfortunately, a bit of online digging turns up the following disturbing reports.
- ZD-Net.co.uk – Sept. 2006 – the dateline on this should be a giveway, but if you miss it, ZD-Net initially posts a quite positive review of Browzar, which might encourage you to try it. The post ends with a later update, though, which says, “…Browzar is not reliably secure and it does not perform as advertised. Alternatives include Firefox and Safari, both of which have privacy functions. Even Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer can optionally erase files it creates during surfing”
- the Australian PC Authority, in a 2009 posting, says, “…Browzar protects your privacy from everyone except anyone who knows a bit about computers and can access index.dat. If someone wants to know where you’ve been online, you must assume they’re serious enough to do just that…If you’re determined to be private online, you’ll want something that does a lot more than Browzar, such as NetCaptor. If you’re really serious, Torpark, which uses Portable Firefox, adds privacy extensions and a distributed anonymous proxy server, where everyone gets pages for everyone else, leaving no easily followed click-trail
- A further check turns up the following note on NetCaptor. “NetCaptor is Dead. Long Live Tabbed Browsing“.
Nothing on the web is forever, it seems – except, perhaps, the “digital fingerprints” you’d really not leave behind..
The sooner kids learn that message, the better. It’s never too young to learn good habits.


