Digital Footprint Quiz

What a digital footprint actually is

Your digital footprint is the sum of everything about you that can be found or inferred online. It has two halves. The active half is what you deliberately publish: posts, photographs, reviews, comments, profiles. The passive half is everything collected about you without a decision on your part — location history, browsing patterns, purchase records, the apps on your phone, the loyalty card at the supermarket, and the data brokers who buy and combine all of it.

The passive half is much larger and much less visible. Most people have a reasonable sense of what they have posted and almost none of what has been recorded.

Why it matters practically

This is not an abstract privacy concern. A detailed footprint is the raw material for fraud.

• Security questions. Your first school, your mother's maiden name, your first pet — most of these are answerable from public profiles and family posts.
• Convincing phishing. A message that references your employer, your recent holiday and your gym is far more effective than a generic one. All three are often public.
• Voice and image cloning. Public video gives fraudsters a sample to work from.
• Physical risk. Holiday posts announce an empty house. Routine posts reveal a schedule. Photo metadata can carry precise locations.
• Identity theft. Date of birth, address history and full name are often enough to begin opening accounts.
• Employment and lending. Old posts surface years later, in contexts you did not anticipate when you wrote them.

Auditing your own footprint

1. Search for yourself. Your name in quotation marks, then with your town, your employer, and your old addresses. Use a private browsing window so your own history does not shape the results. Check images as well as pages.
2. Check your email addresses against breach databases. This tells you which services have already leaked information about you.
3. Review app permissions on your phone. Look for location, microphone, camera, contacts and photo access granted to apps that have no need for it.
4. Review connected accounts. Every service you signed into using Google, Apple or Facebook has some level of access. Revoke the ones you no longer use.
5. Check old accounts. Forums, shopping sites and social networks you abandoned years ago still hold your data and are often the ones that get breached. Delete rather than abandon.
6. Look at what your family posts about you, which is frequently more revealing than your own account.

Reducing it

Set social profiles to private, and review the follower list rather than assuming it is only people you know. Remove your date of birth, phone number and workplace from public view. Turn off location tagging in your camera app. Use a password manager so you are not answering security questions honestly — treat those answers as extra passwords and make them random.

Opt out of data brokers where you can. Several countries have regulators that require removal on request, and even where they do not, most large brokers have an opt-out form. It is tedious and it does work, though it needs repeating annually because records get re-added.

Use a separate email address for shopping and sign-ups, kept apart from the address attached to your bank and your main identity. This limits how much of your footprint can be linked together, and makes it obvious which service leaked when spam starts arriving.

What you cannot remove

Be realistic. Public records, company registers, electoral rolls in some countries, archived pages and anything already scraped and resold are effectively permanent. The goal is not a footprint of zero, which is not achievable for most people. The goal is that the information which secures your accounts — the answers to reset questions, your date of birth, your phone number — is not sitting in public view.