Oracle Database 10g

1. What is a Digital Footprint:

A Digital Footprint is a term used to denote the sum of activities/behaviors recorded for any person on World Wide Web via browsers or mobile phones. This information may include login, logout, visits to web pages, chat messages, mails shared. Some of this information may be available publically on various sites for people to search and some part of this data is stored by websites for tracking user interest and then targeting them. Companies can use this data for evidence, data mining and profiling purposes. It has its benefits as well as drawbacks and at times can be considered as a privacy breach.

2. What does your digital footprint look like? Do a Google search on your name. How many hits did you find? Where we you in the list of hits?

Digital footprint is nothing but our browsing pattern and info like login time, logout time, sites we have visited, web pages visited, shopping details etc. This is stored in user cookies on user’s machine and has details about browsing pattern. Google search of my name found lots of hits on various sites which can be classified like:

a. Social Networking: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, MySpace

b. Business Networking: Linked-in

c. Blogging sites: BlogSpot and WordPress

d. Comments on various blogs and other social networking I have done.

e. Pictures captured from social sites, university sites, and other details.

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