A digital footprint is your history on the internet. No matter what you do, anything you do on the internet will always be there. It is created through your online activity, from loading up your favourite video game to ordering a big Mac on the MyMaccas app, the information is collated by companies. However, while information like this can be used to target ads, or influence your behaviours and decisons, it is not the most harmful form of digital footprint.

Often the most harmful digital footprints you can gain are the ones from social media, where you voluntarily create content about yourself. Once something is posted on social media, bots such as Spiders and Crawlers will collect the information, and keep it in their storage forever. Additonally, many social media platforms such as Reddit and Twitter do not delete posts if you remove them, and will provide it to governments, police departments, or even just a regular person if they have the correct warrant/subpoena. Deleteing a post does not remove it , it is easily accessible through crawling sites, and can be used in both criminal and civil litigation if needed.

Here is a table of the various types of information that can make up your digital footprint:

Type of Info	Includes	Collected by	Accessible by	Used for
Online Activity	Search history, interactions with ads, history of game play time, purchase history	Advertising agencies or software development companies	Data aggregator companies, advertising companies	Providing rich experiences, targeting ads, influencing behaviors and decisions, product improvement
Content created by yourself	YouTube videos, tweets, comments, posts, snaps	Developers of social media platforms, website crawling sites	Anyone on the internet, forever (if it has been picked up by a crawling bot), police departments, governments, anyone with a subpoena	Sharing with friends, gaining online popularity, vetting future employees/students

Sally is commiting wage fraud against her employer, by falsifying her timesheets. She makes, what she believes to be a private Facebook post to her friends raving about her success. When Sally's boss eventually finds out, Facebook recieves a subpoena for information about Sally's account (as part of a lawsuit against her), and must provide all of her information, including the post. This post is used as conclusive evidence in civil court, which results in Sally having to pay back her stolen wages, and pay her boss punative damages. When Peter was young, he had some very strong political views, mainly because his siblings imposed them upon him. In his youth Peter often posted about these, on public websites such as Twitter and Reddit. Now 25, Peter discovers that these views were offensive, and reinforced stereotypes, so he moves away from these views, deleting his posts. Peter applies for a job at a diveristy charity. As part of the screening check, they uncover his 'deleted' posts on https://archive.org, a website which crawls internet posts and keeps a record of them. He is denied the job, for having views which conflict that of the charity.