Today's Edition
By Dr. Mohamed Hamad Al Kuwaiti*
Our daily and diverse online activities have become like tiny LEGO bricks. When pieced together, they form an ever-growing digital portrait of our identity, movements, preferences, and even future intentions.
This digital image can be used to streamline our lives, from purchasing and searching online to customising content for consumers. Companies use it to target specific audiences, employers may access it to evaluate job applicants, and advertisers track your movements across multiple websites.
However, on the darker side, this digital footprint, created by paying tolls, passing by surveillance cameras, or switching mobile phones, can form a comprehensive record of your daily movements and preferences. These digital traces encompass all interactions and information tied to an individual across various platforms and online services, including social media activity, online shopping, web browsing history, app usage, location data, medical information, transportation, delivery services, and even food and drink habits.
In fact, you might leave a digital trail simply by walking down the street through navigation and map apps. When websites share data and link your personal identifiers, they can build a more detailed and sophisticated profile of you. This includes the places you've visited, products you've bought, your address, age, gender, health status, job and much more, essentially everything you've ever shared online.
At this point, your digital footprint can silently infringe upon your privacy, and when it falls into the hands of scammers, it may become a tool for digital extortion.
Hackers and cybercriminals can exploit this data for identity theft or phishing scams. Data breaches may expose your personal information, and this data can be used to intimidate or blackmail individuals by acquiring personal details via data brokers or people-search websites.
The complexity of digital footprints makes the issue more difficult to manage. While individuals can avoid things like phishing emails and scam calls, their digital footprint provides fraudsters with highly detailed information about their lives and families, easily and without consent. That's why it's critical to understand how effortlessly someone can obtain this information in today's world.
While completely erasing your digital footprint is nearly impossible, users can take steps to minimise it. This includes deleting old personal files and accounts on websites and apps you've used over the years, reviewing your online data, managing privacy settings on various apps and platforms, using creator accounts on social media, and removing inactive or unused accounts.
Always check the privacy settings of any app or service you use, as default settings typically serve the provider's interest, such as sharing your data for marketing purposes, making it essential to adjust those settings to protect your privacy.
You should also be cautious about who can view your posts on social media platforms. It's advisable to set your default audience to "Friends Only" to avoid unintentionally sharing everything with search engines.
Additionally, using separate email addresses for work and personal use helps to compartmentalise different aspects of your digital footprint.
Moreover, there are a variety of tools and software available to enhance your digital privacy. Many privacy-focused tools, especially browser extensions, can help protect specific aspects of your online identity and provide insight into what service providers are tracking.
Using end-to-end encrypted apps ensures that your digital privacy is safeguarded against breaches through your digital footprint, which could otherwise place your data at risk if you're not careful with your online interactions.
*The writer is the head of the UAE's Cybersecurity Council
