Cinderella or Big Foot? Analysing Size and Impact of Digital Footprints

Which is more valuable: a fistful of money or your email address? It is easy to ascertain the value of currency but personal information? Not so much. Personal information consists of individual pieces that vary in value. Some, like email addresses, have a perceived "low" value so we give it out like candy. In fact, we have given our information to so many different websites, stores, social media sites, and companies that most of us have lost track. While there exist several methods to chart and analyse data such as personal finances, there are not any that attempt to analyse and create a visual representation of a person's digital footprint. Considering that a digital footprint consists of quantitative information, it begs the question, is it possible to represent a digital footprint visually? That is the question this research paper will attempt to answer. The research involved will include human subjects that vary in age and geographic demographics to represent a variety of online presence. Each human subject will disclose a small set of personal information to seed the research. The goal of the research is to uncover a set of predetermined information about each human subject while recording the methods and difficulty of extracting each piece of information. Each piece of personal information in the data set will be measured for impact and difficulty. The pieces will then be linked together graphically to create a visual representation of the digital footprint itself. This research will be valuable to anyone that has disclosed personal information to a third party and has an interest in information privacy. The results will help people understand not only how to visualize their current digital information, but how to better control it. Anyone that has an interest in his or her personal privacy and how to protect personal information ought to read this paper. Preliminary results show that seemingly harmless information such as telephone numbers or email addresses can be quite impactful if combined with each other. Many of these "low valued" pieces of information are gateways (very EASY gateways) to much more valuable information. This research will help to readjust the value people place on their personal information and furthermore, their privacy.