How Should Students Manage Their Digital Footprints?

contributed by Justin Boyle

If you’ve scratched your head over suggestions to manage your ‘digital footprint,’ you aren’t the only one.

A surprisingly large percentage of people have never even heard the phrase, let alone thought about how to manage theirs responsibly. Among students, the percentage is probably higher. We’ll talk about ways you can help students understand and manage their digital footprints before they get themselves in trouble.

The Definition Of A Digital Footprint

Simply put, a digital footprint is the record or trail left by the things you do online. Your social media activity, the info on your personal website, your browsing history, your online subscriptions, any photo galleries and videos you’ve uploaded — essentially, anything on the Internet with your name on it. Digital natives like today’s students rarely think twice about putting their names on things online, so their footprints can be pretty wide.

Luckily for us all, most of the major sources of personal information can be tweaked, so we share only certain things with the general public. There are even some third-party bonus tools available to manage the parts of our digital footprints we might not know were there.

For students having grown up in a social/digital environment, helping them see where and how they’re vulnerable may be the most critical step. If they’re not suitably motivated, very little of what you say will be compelling.

But after a little Google searching and social media dots connecting, just seeing the breadth of info about us that exists online is enough to spur them to action.

What To Tell Your Students About Monitoring Their Digital Footprints: 11 Tips

1. Be kind, helpful, and understanding

Or put another way, demonstrate digital citizenship.

This may not seem like a way to practically ‘manage your digital footprint,’ but part of managing your digital footprint isn’t just about privacy and anonymity. In large part, one of the most effective ways to ‘manage’ your footprints is to make sure that the prints you do leave are good ones.

2. Use privacy settings

Let’s talk Facebook, shall we? Chances are pretty good that your students can be counted among the 1.3 billion monthly active users of the social media giant, and there’s practically no other website that contains such a breadth and depth of personal information.

Encouraging students to put all of their social media accounts, including Facebook, on a short leash might be the most important step toward helping them manage their digital footprint. Look into Facebook’s proprietary privacy tips or get the works from Lifehacker.com with its “Always Up-to-Date Guide to Managing Your Facebook Privacy,” then inform students about the steps they can take. Better yet, just pass the links along.

Complete privacy on Twitter is simple — you just choose to protect your tweets under ‘security and privacy’ on the account settings page — but encouraging students to do so might do more harm than good. Some teachers have gotten great results using Twitter in education, and a class full of students with protected tweets might interfere with that.

3. Keep a list of accounts

Then delete the ones you no longer use. That myspace page you signed up for? Don’t just forget about it–find it and delete it.

One tip: Use Pocket (and add the Pocket button to your browser–for Google Chrome, for example). Every time you sign up for an account, add that site to your ‘Pocket’ account and tag it ‘Account.’ Then, every six months, go in and deactivate/remove dormant accounts you no longer need or use.

4. Don’t overshare 

Perhaps the best tip for helping students maintain privacy on Twitter is one that can be applied across the whole spectrum of social networking tools: Don’t overshare.

As much of an alien concept as it may be to students these days, the only surefire way to avoid digital footprint trouble is for them to keep quiet about anything they wouldn’t want the world to know. This includes usernames, aliases, passwords, last names, full-names-as-usernames, pictures, addresses, and other important information but also their moods and boyfriends and girlfriends and

5. Use a password keeper

This is more of a security thing, but the worst kind of footprint is the one you didn’t make that contains all of your sensitive information. It’s too much work to remember 50 different passwords, and every site has its own unique rules.

Until someone solves this problem, the best solution is likely a password keeper

6. Google yourself

You may be surprised what you find.

7. Monitor linking accounts

When you link your facebook or twitter account to that new site (whatever site that might be), you may not realize–or care at the moment–what you’re giving it access to. It’s usually safest to use a secondary email address to sign-up for new sites rather than granting this kind of access.

8. Consider using an anonymous secondary email

Whether you’re communicating with someone new or signing up for a new social media platform, it can be useful to have a secondary email address.

9. At least skim the terms and conditions

Few people read every word of every Terms & Conditions page–and even if you did, you may not understand them all and how they can and might impact you. But to not even have the slightest idea what you’re agreeing to when you do ‘accept’ those terms and conditions only has the potential to harm any legacy of your use of a site, platform, or page (i.e., your digital footprints).

10. Know that sending is like publishing–forever

Every time you send a message, post, or picture, you’re publishing it the same way CNN does a news story. And the internet never forgets.

11. Understand that searches are social

There’s another side to your digital footprint, too — it’s not always information that you choose to make public. Remember, with or without privacy controls, Facebook still records and uses every scrap of information it gets to better determine its users’ marketing demographics. Like HIPAA data, digital data privacy matters–thus recent GDPR laws.

Google pulls the same trick with search and browsing habits. If a student is logged into their Google account, the service tracks every keyword they search, every web page they visit, and every time they visit Youtube.

There are ways, however, to control the bits of deep data that we leave strewn around. First of all, even though Google is practically an official synonym for ‘web search,’ it isn’t actually the only game in town. Less profit-motivated search engines like DuckDuckGo.com and bing may take a little getting used to, but they can sometimes make clearer efforts to protect users’ browsing privacy.

12. Use digital tools to manage your digital footprint

A host of browser extensions and app add-ons can also limit the surreptitious capture of personal information. VPNs, VPN protocols, and other browser tools and website opt-outs, to name a few. (You can read more about TeachThought’s Privacy Policy here, for example.)

Conclusion

There are also some extreme measures. Browsing from behind a virtual private network, or VPN, puts a layer of thick fog between online activity and real-world identity. If even that isn’t enough for your suddenly privacy-hungry students, there’s also the nuclear option.

You may have heard of Tor, the multi-layered proxy client that’s a go-to for anyone looking to access the fabled Deep Web. By routing your IP address through multiple proxies, Tor protects users from anyone anywhere ever knowing who they are or what they’re looking at.

Of course, full online anonymity would also require students to avoid all login-based media (including app stores like Apple’s App Store and Google Play), which can be a harder task than they’re ready to accept. It may also be important to remind them that while we’re not browsing in a vacuum and we’re very rarely actually anonymous, most of our deep data is probably pretty benign.

Just make sure to let them know that everything that they post, tweet, comment or like is going down on their permanent record. Honestly, everything. That ought to get them thinking, at least.

Justin Boyle is a writer and multimedia designer who lives and works in Austin, Texas

12 Tips For Students To Manage Their Digital Footprints