How might your digital footprint affect your future opportunities? Give at least two examples.

Your digital footprint could drastically affect your future in many ways and could also stop you from achieving your goals in life if you are not careful. One way in which you could be hurt by your online history is in education; even in high school consequences could occur if you were being irresponsible online, but the main point where it could really hurt you is when you want to go to university or college and have trouble being accepted by anyone because of your internet history. Even if you were already accepted and had a full-ride scholarship, it could be taken away if you were no longer an acceptable candidate; that would also go on your record for other schools to see. Another way it could affect you is when you apply for jobs. Even if it’s not that bad, it still gives the other people applying an automatic advantage and could really get in your way of earning the money that you want to be earning.

Describe at least three strategies that you can use to keep your digital footprint appropriate and safe.

One strategy that is always good to keep in mind when on social media is to ask yourself if what you’re posting is something that you would want to hide from people, or that you would be ashamed if people found. It’s always better to stay less personal on social media and generally keep your private life off of it. Another strategy in keeping your digital footprint safe is having a private account. It is a lot safer with a private account because you control who follows you and sees what you’re posting, and you won’t have strangers finding out details about your life. You can also avoid using your real/full name on social media because it keeps you a lot more hidden and you are less likely to have information about you come up when someone google searches your name. One final strategy is to not have a goal of getting lots of followers because a lot of the time people get less bothered by whether or not they know who is following them when they start to want a larger following.

What information did you learn that you would pass on to other students? How would you go about telling them?

Some information that was very new to me was that your iPhone tracks where you’ve been and stores it. You can find this information deep in your settings but it is apparent that it is not something that it wants to be shown to people, and not many people at all would know about this. I would definitely pass this on to other students because it is very weird and people should be able to know what their phone is doing with their information; I would tell them this by walking them through it so that they could see for themselves, because that has the most effect. I also learned that people like employers or universities sometimes check your history on the internet before accepting you and you should be careful for that reason. I would tell other students this so that they can be aware and watch what they are posting on social media; I would probably tell them during a normal conversation because it’s just a heads up.

Photo credits:

Picture 1 – by Dean Moriarty (terimakasih0) on Pixabay

Picture 2 – by Pixabay on Pexels

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Picture 4 – by William Iven on Pixabay