footprint2020 | Riley's Blog

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

Your digital footprint can affect many future opportunities in many ways. For example, when you apply for a job, your employer might do a quick google search on you to get to know who you are. If you have immature, inappropriate, or private information that can be traced back to you, it isn’t a good first impression, and when the employer has the choice between you and someone else, they would go with the latter. It can even affect scholarships and post-secondary opportunities, as many post-secondary schools strive to have a good image and reputation. Your digital footprint can also affect future relationships. The first thing people do nowadays when they meet new friends or potential new partners, is they exchange cell numbers and social medias. If the first thing your potential new friend learns about you is that you have done very inappropriate or immature things and posted it on social media, it could deteriorate that friendship/relationship, or prevent it from starting all together. So all in all, your future relationships and jobs can be affected by a negative digital footprint, and it can hurt your future if you don’t start building a better digital footprint now. But in my opinion, worst of all could be if someone uses your photos and pretends to be you, aka identity theft. If you have many public photos of yourself, it can be easy for someone to pretend to be you, which is just another one of the many reasons to keep a private profile, or a social media with little public information. Making your social medias private is the only way to control who can see your potentially private information.

However, up to this point I have only talked about the negative effects. Keeping a neutral digital footprint is good, however keeping a positive digital footprint is even better. For example, job employers love to see people who go above and beyond, and who are truly good people inside and outside the workplace. If you keep your social medias proper, with photos of you and your friends, and perhaps photos of some of your extracurricular activities (like sports), it can show a job employer just how much of a positive, unique and friendly individual you are. The same thing goes for new friends you make. When they go to your social media and see that you are a positive and caring person, they will feel as if they have made a good choice in friends, and they will see you in an even brighter way than they already do.

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

The easiest and most effective strategy to keep your digital footprint appropriate is to think before you post. Maybe if you have a questionable photo of you that you are thinking of posting, you should wait a day, and see if you change your mind about posting the photo. Most of the time people don’t try to post hurtful images of themselves that can damage their reputation, they just post it in the heat of the moment. In my opinion, the most effective strategy to keep a positive digital footprint is to force yourself to wait a day to post something no matter what you’re posting, because you might just wake up in the morning and realize that posting that certain photo could be a very bad idea.
Failing that, if you at least set your social media profiles to private, you can at least control who can see your photos. Everyone slips up and posts something that they might regret, no one is perfect. If you can at least control who sees those photos, you can make sure everyone who can see them won’t save your embarrassing photos, as you can choose only responsible friends to be able to view your profile. This also makes it easier to wipe those embarrassing or inappropriate photos from the web later, as they wouldn’t have surfaced to anyone outside of your friend group. You can even help each other out by commenting on a friend’s post when they posted something that they shouldn’t have, as being friends with people with positive digital footprints can sometimes be just as important as having a positive digital footprint yourself, because it is very easy to trace who you are friends with on social media platforms.
Another good way to keep a safe and appropriate digital footprint is to actively reflect on your social medias. Check back every month or so on your social medias. Do you have an old social media rotting away that you don’t use anymore? Consider deleting it. Do you see old posts you’ve posted that you aren’t proud of? Delete them. See friends or family that have posted potentially regrettable things? Inform them. Also make sure to google yourself too as sometimes you are tagged in random inappropriate/immature posts that don’t even have to do with you.
Keeping strong, safe passwords and never sharing them can keep your private info safe. The same way you wouldn’t give someone your locker combo, or give someone your credit card details, you shouldn’t give someone your passwords. Even if it someone you can trust, they can always tell someone that they trust, and then the secret goes on from there. Also, hackers can breakthrough weak passwords and access personal information, sensitive messages sent in DM’s, and more.

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

I learned a lot of useful and important information that I would pass on to other students. I would tell people about the dangers of social medias, and how to build a positive digital footprint for themselves. I would tell them some ways that they can be safe and keep an appropriate and mature online presence and would share some of my strategies listed above to try and help them out. I would go about telling them this information by probably just sharing the URL of this blog to them, since I can easily share the information that way. I would also encourage all my friends and all other students just to just search themselves up, because seeing their digital footprint firsthand is the easiest way to get the message across to them.