Written by
Tim Tran
Edited by
Anne Cutler
Reviewed by
Darren Guccione
Your digital footprint is the trail of data you leave behind online. It’s important to have a positive digital footprint to maintain your relationships, help you in all your personal and professional endeavors, and keep cybercriminals at bay. To create a positive digital footprint, you need to remove any negative posts, post positive content, think before you post, and interact with others with respect and kindness.
Continue reading to learn more about a positive digital footprint, why it matters, four tips for creating a positive digital footprint and how to protect your digital footprint.
A digital footprint is a collection of traceable data left behind from a unique set of online activities. Some examples of data that make up your digital footprint include browser cookies, social media posts, browsing history, metadata from photos and data collected from apps.
A positive digital footprint is the traceable data that builds your positive reputation online. This includes everything online that shows your positive traits such as posts about professional wins, photos of you volunteering at a charity event and comments of you supporting your colleagues.
Having a positive digital footprint is important for maintaining good relationships, improving your employability and ensuring your safety online. By having a good reputation online, you can expand your network, and build healthy and meaningful relationships. Employers may evaluate your online presence to determine whether you are worth hiring. A good online reputation helps you boost your employment opportunities, achieve your career goals and ensure your online safety.
To create a positive digital footprint, you need to clean up your current digital footprint. Here are four tips for creating a positive digital footprint.
The first step to cleaning up your digital footprint is to remove any negative posts on your social media and other online platforms. A positive digital footprint is made up of online data that highlights your positive traits. You need to get rid of any posts that portray you in a negative light. That includes controversial posts that others may interpret as mean, ignorant or unprofessional. Try to also remove yourself from other people’s negative posts to dissociate yourself from them. Your friends, family and colleagues can see your posts on social media. Remove any content that you wouldn’t want them to see.
After you have deleted the negative posts from your social media and other online platforms, you need to post positively on social media. Display your best traits on social media through a mixture of words, photos, videos and shared articles. Show off your skills that others would find interesting, your professional achievements and profound experiences you want others to know about.
When you are creating a positive digital footprint, you need to think before you post or share anything online. You want to avoid oversharing online as it can jeopardize your privacy and potentially damage your reputation. You have to remember that your family, friends and colleagues can see what you post online. Before you post anything online, you have to think if any of them would think that your posts weren’t appropriate. Try to keep all of your posts online professional, positive and respectful.
Many people online will try to troll others to get a reaction out of them that typically portrays them negatively. You should avoid interacting with trolls to preserve your positive digital footprint. When interacting with others online, you should always be kind and keep it positive. Avoid using any offensive or hurtful language when addressing others on the internet. Try to be friendly, respectful and supportive of others online, whether it be with a stranger or your colleagues.
Once you have done your best to create a positive digital footprint, you need to protect it. Your digital footprint can easily be exploited by online threat actors if not properly secured. If a threat actor exploits your digital footprint, they can damage your positive digital footprint. Here are the ways you can protect your digital footprint.
To protect your digital footprint and maintain your positive digital footprint, you need to limit and protect your online accounts. You need to delete any accounts that you do not use anymore or that may portray you in a negative way. Deleting old accounts helps reduce the number of potential accounts cybercriminals could compromise and take over. If a cybercriminal takes over an account of yours, they can use it to steal your sensitive information and commit fraud, damaging your reputation.
The best way to manage your online accounts is with a password manager. A password manager is a tool that securely stores and manages your login information for your online accounts in a digitally encrypted vault. Since you store all of your login information for your online accounts in a password manager, you can easily keep track of them and ensure they are protected with strong and unique passwords. It allows you to easily audit your accounts and determine which accounts you want to delete or deactivate.
When posting online, you should avoid oversharing to protect your online privacy and maintain a positive digital footprint. When you overshare on social media, cybercriminals can use the information that you post for targeted cyber attacks to gain unauthorized access to your accounts and your personal information. Oversharing on social media can also lead to cyber harassment, compromised physical security and a ruined reputation. To avoid oversharing on social media, you should monitor your followers, be thoughtful about what you post and set your social media accounts to private.
Websites, apps, devices and browsers will automatically collect your information in the background without your knowledge. You agree to allow these services to collect your information to use them. However, you need to be careful with how much information these services can access. To prevent these services from automatically collecting all of your data, you need to adjust your privacy settings to the most strict settings to limit the data collected. If a service asks for permission to track you or use optional cookies, decline them and opt out of any services that already do so.
People search sites, also known as people finder sites, are websites that collect, publish and sell your personal information. They collect data from public records, forums and social media accounts. Some will buy data from private companies. You need to remove your information from people search sites to protect your online privacy from cybercriminals and targeted attacks.
To remove your information from people search sites, follow these steps:
Having a positive digital footprint is important to building a good reputation, ensuring your safety, expanding your network, maintaining relationships and improving your employability. Once you have created a positive digital footprint, you also need to protect it from getting exploited by threat actors. To protect your digital footprint, you need to use a password manager to audit your online accounts.
Try Keeper to securely store your passwords and manage your online accounts.
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