Whenever you leave your home to interact with the world outside, you leave a plethora of fingerprints and DNA everywhere. This is physical evidence of your existence that can be used against you if necessary. On the Internet you leave something more sinister behind – your digital footprint. And for a vast majority of the time, you agree to it.
A digital footprint is everything on the Internet that is about you. It’s every profile you have on social networks like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on; Everything that you’ve ever said about yourself or that’s been said about you; every picture you’ve ever uploaded or been tagged in; every website you’ve ever visited; every thing you’ve ever searched for.
In many ways, some of these infractions on our privacy are easily overlooked because they make browsing for information a lot faster. You don’t even have to complete the sentence most times. Google will do it for you. But if Google knows what you are likely to type before you do it, who else could know?
The answer is rather simple – for any government agency that requests that information, and not only that information, your entire digital footprint can be accessed 24/7.
We have rapidly descended into an Orwellian society after the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York. Laws that chip away from The Constitution and The Bill of Rights have been introduced to protect us from those who may want to do us harm. But who will protect us from those meant to protect us?
Very few bother to read the terms and conditions and privacy policies before clicking on agree. There are quite a few questionable items in these lengthy commitments, and the language used is so tedious and discouraging that we’re likely to agree to anything just to stop reading.
Don’t think that your digital footprint is limited to what you do online with your computer. Your mobile phone contributes as well. It’s actually worse with your smart phone. Millions of them come with a piece of software already installed called Carrier IQ. Without the program the phone will supposedly not work properly so getting rid of it is a serious hazard. What the program does is to record every single keystroke you ever make, log every phone call, and every other activity.
All your logins and passwords, SMS messages, phone calls, pictures, videos, contacts, and so on can be easily extracted from your device. This is what intelligence agencies around the world are doing today. They are listening and watching everything we do, wherever we are.
Welcome to 1984, the 2013 version. Click to agree.
