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

If you attempt to enroll for a college or look for a job, your employers will sleuth the internet in search for any information that will shed light on your personality. They can check if you have any…undesirable traits like aggression, racism, or unprofessional behavior simply from any posts that you made in the past. While at face value these don’t give a 100% accurate reflection on your character, they will carefully scrutinize these since they have little to no information outside of your resume.

Any future relationships that you may have, like potential partners, might also check your profile to see if you have traits they may not want in someone they intend to spend their life with. If they find out that you are aggressive and abusive, they may turn you down and look for better people, besides, there are plenty more fish in the sea.

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

Do not show any personal information. Use a username instead of your full name, don’t show your home address, keep your account so that only friends can see them, and overall be secure and keep any confidential information away from prying eyes.

Keep watch over your accounts and passwords. Always keep them in a security app like LastPass or Applock, and to reinforce security even further, make passwords for these security apps even harder than your personal account passwords

Don’t be reckless. By simply exercising caution you can effectively protect your information to a large degree.

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

Add the site name to the end of your password for certain sites, like using passwordInstagram, passwordSteam or passwordGmail

Be careful when dealing with location based services, since certain apps may request permission for services that aren’t even tied to their original use, like a Camera requesting location permission, while it has it’s fair share of positives, always be aware of the potential security threat.

There will always be people who would want to steal your personal information through viruses and spam mail, always make sure that your anti-virus is up to date and to be on the safe side, manually go through your emails and messages to make sure that no files like viruses are present.