What your digital footprint reveals that you never would!

You stand in the middle of a major supermarket on a busy Saturday morning, pull up a box and stand on it to make sure that you maximise your audience then announce to all “We’re going on holiday on Saturday to Spain for two weeks, the dog is in the kennel and I never got around to fixing that back gate that blew down recently... so help yourselves.”

Of course you wouldn’t do this - but you may do on social media.

Digital footprints are becoming an increasing concern to companies with regard to their employees.

The work environment is fairly well protected with firewalls, email monitoring and contractual clauses but once people drop in to their personal environment they often drop their guard, revealing far more than they attended.

By nature social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Linked In are social, and the nature of them means that behaviour is often the same as when you are in a social environment.

Within minutes of searching an individual’s social media account you can often see where they work, the skills that they use, the projects that they are working on, the clients (or potential clients) that they are working with even their colleagues details – information that you would never normally share with a competitor.

Take a step further in to perfectly acceptable personal practices, like dating sites, and information shared to make you more attractive to a potential partner becomes potential leverage in a business environment.

The introduction of tools to allow image searches means that very quickly your multiple digital profiles and identities can be linked together to reveal your digital footprint.

Industry forums can be a great assistance when sharing common knowledge or practice… but how much information is being revealed?

Cyber security companies are now being asked to research employee’s digital footprints and educate them with regard to what is being revealed and what should be corrected.

Damon Rands, of Newport-based Wolfberry, revealed a frightening statistic: “We were recently asked to audit the digital footprint of a company of 1,500 employees and produce a summary at the end. After only 10 employees we were concerned enough to return to the client to suggest immediate actions to protect both themselves and the employees concerned.”

So what are some simple steps to take straight away?

1. Google yourself, your colleagues or employees – this will just scratch the surface of available information but will give you an initial of what is out there.

2. Control your privacy settings – tighten up who and what you share and consider that next connection request – do you really want to reveal everything you post to that person.

3. Monitor linking accounts – using that easy option to use your Facebook or Twitter account to access a new site means that you are probably revealing far more to that new site than you ever intended.

4. Understand that free is often free – you can’t run a website with billions of members for free, so be aware that they are collecting, and possibly sharing, information about you when you are using that site and possibly others.

Every time that you publish a post, message or picture remember that the internet never forgets.