When I was a kid, the internet seemed to be a mysterious place full of mystery and wonder, but as an adult, I find that the internet is not all that mysterious of a place after all. I would even go as far as to say that the internet is an incredibly predictable, albeit complex, system. If someone were to post that they had a craving for Oreos, you could probably make an educated guess as to what might happen next. That person will open a social media app and be fed an assortment of targeted advertisements, including a slight nudge to purchase Oreos. This would suggest that everything that you do online, whether private or public, will ultimately affect your overall experience using the internet. The more information you plug into websites and apps, the more those websites and apps know about you.
The internet was at one time a handful of websites that I was allowed to access, as far as my mind was concerned. Beyond web browsers attached to dial-up connections, there was not a lot of convenient ways for the average person to engage with the internet. I remember believing that the internet was simply a database of information, peppered with flash video websites and funny pictures that would take up a whopping kilobyte of hard drive space and take forever to load. My interpretation of the internet was naïve and therefore caused me to make some crucial internet errors as a kid. From an early age, even before there was such a thing as YouTube, I was creating cartoons on my computer and posting them onto the internet, complete with my full name in a credit sequence. These cartoons were poorly made, incredibly simple in plot, but most importantly, these videos were crass and violent. While I made these videos around the age of 10 and formally deleted them all at around the age of 12, once something is on the internet, it is there forever.
I think back to this time in my life, animating stick characters shooting each other with guns to resolve conflict, I wonder about the overall impact the internet has on the lives of the average citizen. With the existence of web services like The Way Back Machine on archive.org, anyone can type in a webpage and view what this webpage would look like on specific dates in the past. While this is a relatively useful tool, it could also be used to find deleted content that a person might not want the public to see. For me, this is my silly violent cartoons. While I have personally not been able to locate these videos, which I have honestly tried to do many times for the sake of nostalgia, I am certain that someone with a deeper knowledge of the internet would be able to create or have access to similar tools that may be able to find those deleted videos, and ultimately find my full name attached to them.
Would anything even occur if someone found old videos that I made at the age of ten? I would highly doubt it, but given a certain profession, a digital footprint could become problematic. For instance, someone could make a tweet that they immediately recognize as inappropriate and delete it. Years later, when this person is a politician, it is revealed that this tweet was made. Depending on the content, this kind of deep dive into digital footprint could realistically end that politician’s career. Again, it is very unlikely that any of the content in the relatively tame videos I made as a kid would ever impact my career, but what if there is something else, I am not considering? Did I once share a controversial opinion on Facebook, but swiftly delete it? Is deleted content ever really deleted and can it be used against you? These are the questions I began asking myself in the last few years, which slowed my own social media posting down quite significantly.
Of course, digital footprint can be difficult to accurately assess unless you are looking for something specific and know exactly where to find it, but in professions where you are in the public eye, such as teaching, it is simpler to post only the kind of content or information you would be comfortable with a parent or a student seeing. As we move into a progressively more digital era, the amount of content on the internet will continue to multiply exponentially, but that does not always mean that your content will be drowned by others. Someone experienced looking for dirt on you will be able to dive deep into your footprint. Try to give them as little to find as possible. Just remember, that if someone can find out that you are craving Oreos, they can certainly find out much more about you based on your digital footprint.