Every year, one of my master's students at the Complutense University of Madrid or UNED asks me how they can erase their digital footprint . Sometimes it's a boy, sometimes it's a girl. Sometimes the question is how to quickly delete all the tweets from their personal profile, which they've set to private but would like to make public again. Other times, it's how to prevent certain information from appearing in Google search results when they type their name.
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They're staring into the abyss of finding their first job, and that's phone number list when their digital footprint and identity begin to worry them. Truly.
Before continuing to talk about how to protect your digital footprint and identity, a brief clarification: the two concepts are not equivalent.
A digital footprint is our trace on the Internet—the set of activities, actions, contributions, data, and digital communications we leave on Internet servers and the mark we leave behind every time we browse and interact on the Internet.
Our digital identity is the information about us that can be found on the Internet and that makes up the image we project and that others have of us: it positively or negatively affects our perception and our online reputation .
Several years ago, I explained in this post how to know what data Google has about you and how to control it . Now we're going a few steps further, with 14 tips to protect your digital footprint and identity.
1. Manage browser cookies
Although it may seem obvious, it's worth remembering that we're not required to accept cookies from a website. However, since the General Data Protection Regulation came into force, all websites are required to ask us if we accept them.