Another example of how humans can leave traces of information is within the text and photos they send to social media. What may seem an innocent sharing of hobbies and interests can be used to create to pinpoint someone’s location or their home and put them at the risk of harm.

A personal example of this I’ve seen is a gentleman who posted lots of his valuable vinyl records on social media, then went to sell some of them for money on another public social media site. When this happened someone connected the pseudonym they were using on Instagram and the photos they posted to brag about what they had in their possession, with the profile and similar photos of the same albums they were using on Facebook and generated a fake profile to contact the gentleman. The person selling some records then gave the stranger on Facebook with the fake profile, their address, who then proceeded to rob them. Not only did the thief now know where the person lived, but already knew from their Instagram posts what a lot of the expensive records they owned were so they could quickly search through the victims’ shelves (which were noted to have been sorted alphabetically in a social media post/discussion) and steal the most valuable of them. Your digital footprint is constructed every time you do an activity or add data to any site, whether on purpose or the site or app collecting your information in the background.