Digital Footprints

When and where should we be teaching students about their digital footprint?

 A valuable study done by the Pew Foundation distinguishes between an active digital footprint and a passive one. 

 “The more content we contribute voluntarily to the public or semi-public corners of the Web, the more we are not only findable, but also knowable. The more content we contribute to the public or semi-public corners of the Web, the more we grow our active digital footprint. These are the traces of data we contribute voluntarily, often in specific contexts with specific audiences in mind.”

 “There are the data points uploaded to the internet as a matter of course, along with other public records like home sales, court records, and newspaper accounts. Layered on top of these publicly available sources are proprietary databases containing information such as cell phone numbers and political affiliations. This is the passive digital footprint, the one that grows with no deliberate intervention from an individual.”

 Source: Online Identity Management and Search in the Age of Transparency  - Pew Internet.     http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2007/Digital-Footprints.aspx

 Whether passive or active, the digital footprint of each of us is growing and as it does, more and more of ourselves is captured forever on the Web. As the social web sites that we use become more personal, we become more and more transparent. The question is: is there a problem with these digital footprints and our ever-increasing transparency?

 Kevin Kelly, in his blog, “The Technium,” writes: “The price of total personalization is total transparency. Transparency suggests a more active role, rather than an imposed view. You have to BE transparent.  And of course, it is impossible to have total personalization with perfect knowledge.” How much transparency do we want even if we are able to actively manage it as Kelly advises?    http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/05/total_personliz.php

 “We cannot expect that having large warehouses of data on individuals will be free from unintended consequences, especially when there are incentives to try to build highly detailed models of everyone's lives. The price of total personalization is total surveillance.” Seth Finkelstein, The Guardian, Thursday 15 November, 2007

How many of us are ready to submit to the total surveillance that Mr. Finkelstein believes comes with total personalization?

 I believe that schools should not only address the when and where but also the how of teaching students about their digital footprint. I would like to see students take a one-quarter class in learning how to actively manage their digital footprint. This class should include teaching students to install two software applications: Tor and Privoxy.

“Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.

Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol.

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world use Tor for a wide variety of reasons: journalists and bloggers, human rights workers, law enforcement officers, soldiers, corporations, citizens of repressive regimes, and just ordinary citizens.”        https://www.torproject.org/

 From the Privoxy website: “A web proxy is a service, based on a software such as Privoxy, that clients (i.e. browsers) can use instead of connecting to web servers directly. The clients then ask the proxy to request objects (web pages, images, movies etc) on their behalf and to forward the data to the clients. It is a "go-between". For details, see Wikipedia's proxy definition.

There are many reasons to use web proxies, such as security (firewalling), efficiency (caching) and others, and there are any number of proxies to accommodate those needs.

Privoxy is a proxy that is primarily focused on privacy enhancement, ad and junk elimination and freeing the user from restrictions placed on his activities. Sitting between your browser(s) and the Internet, it is in a perfect position to filter outbound personal information that your browser is leaking, as well as inbound junk. It uses a variety of techniques to do this, all of which are under your complete control via the various configuration files and options. Being a proxy also makes it easier to share configurations among multiple browsers and/or users.”          http://www.privoxy.org/faq/general.html#PROXYMORON