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Your digital footprint is essentially a data trail of all your online activities. It includes social media posts, emails, banking information, online purchases, medical data, GPS location, and more. A larger digital footprint can mean an increase in spam messages, scams, phishing attempts, and a greater risk of hackers targeting you.
If you want to learn more about your digital footprint and how to protect or regain your privacy, we’ve included everything you need to know in our guide below. We’ve also included our recommendations for the best data removal services you can use.
Everything you do online combines to create your digital footprint. If you post to your social media account, web crawlers capture that almost immediately and save it somewhere in the internet’s vast expanse and that site’s servers.
However, the intentional things you post online are only a small part of your digital presence. Cookies saved by your visited websites show where you’ve been. These hidden trackers follow you around, view what you look at, and know what you buy.
Everything you do is tracked, viewed, and collated to create an image of you online. It’s like a private channel looking at every site you’ve visited, every internet search you’ve made, every purchase you complete, and more. Are you creeped out yet?
Considering there are multiple ways to leave an imprint online, there are different types of digital footprints. Most markers are sorted into the following four groups.
Active content is always initiated by the user. Whether you’re sending an email, posting to social media, or updating a blog, you, the user, initiate the data transfer. There’s a saying that once you put something online, it can never truly be deleted. Because of data collectors and web crawlers, this is very true.
Examples of active digital footprints:
A passive digital footprint is something the user may be aware of, like accepting cookies on a website, but may not realize how extensive a record is being created. Some websites are transparent about their data collection, while others may try to be sneakier about it.
Examples of passive digital footprints:
Some information about you online, even if password-protected or securely guarded, still contributes to your digital footprint. Data like bank info, wearable health devices, and private chats may have limited accessibility, but it still contributes to your footprint.
Examples of private digital footprints:
People aren’t the only ones creating a profile of themselves online. Businesses also leave a commercial footprint across the web via marketing campaigns, social media, online reviews, internal business communications, and more. If you interact with these types of activities, you’ll be tied to the commercial footprint left.
Examples of commercial digital footprints:
Here’s an overview of the main ways your digital footprint is stored.
We often hear the phrase, “I’m not doing anything illegal, so why do I care about my digital footprint?” Digital footprints aren’t just used to track criminals and illegal activity. Data brokers collect information about you from around the web, aggregate it, and then sell it to anyone who wants it. Sites like PeopleFinder and The White Pages will sell your data to regular internet users, which means anyone can find a way to contact you.
Even more egregious, Kroger recently announced facial recognition technology that could be integrated into its grocery store shelves. It would recognize you and then show a price for a product based on what it thinks you would pay.
Your digital footprint is also tied to your online reputation. For example, everything you post on social media can be seen by your current or future employers. That’s why you should try to create a positive digital footprint, something that gives you a good reputation.
We can all agree that someone else watching what you do is uncomfortable. It’s creepy if someone peers through your window at night, and it’s creepy if someone looks at your online activity. But more than being disturbing, a large digital footprint can leave you open to all sorts of vulnerabilities, scams, and even the possibility of being charged more at the store.
Examples of harmful real-world repercussions:
There are a variety of tools you can use to reduce your digital footprint, delete already stored data, and protect yourself from future data collection. There are also actions you can take like rejecting all possible cookies and cleaning up your social media profiles.
You can’t remove things like banking data or health records, but protecting those accounts with multifactor authentication (MFA) and complex, unique passwords will help to secure that data from potential leaks and hackers.
The first step to protecting your digital footprint is to be aware of how much of your data is already saved. Knowing that social media saves your information is different from seeing how much of your personal data is available online.
Some ways you can check your digital footprint include:
When you’ve looked up your footprint, you’ll probably want to clean it up a bit. While some information can’t be removed, you may be able to remove part of it.
On top of cleaning up your footprint, you should make sure you’re practicing good digital hygiene. Here are some tips you should follow to prevent your digital footprint from growing.
A good antivirus program can keep malware, including adware and spyware, from downloading onto your device and following you online. If your antivirus includes ad and tracker blockers, that provides even more protection. Below are some of our favorite antivirus solutions.
| Antivirus | 
|
|
|
| Price | $29.00–$49.00/yr (first year only) | $29.99–$249.99/yr | $29.99–$99.99/first yr |
| # of devices protected | 4 - 8 | Unlimited | 1 - 10 |
| Malware scans | Manual and scheduled | Manual and scheduled | Manual and scheduled |
| Real-time protection | |||
| EICAR test results | 2/3 | 3/3 | 3/3 |
| Firewall | |||
| Phishing protection | |||
| Compatibility | Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, Chrome, Edge, Opera, Safari | Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge | Windows, Mac, Android, iOS |
| Extras | Password manager, ad blocker, VPN | Parental controls, performance optimization tools, VPN | Password manager, VPN, dark web monitoring, parental controls, privacy monitor, identity theft protection, cloud backup |
| 24/7 customer support | |||
| Learn more | Get TotalAV | Get McAfee | Get Norton 360 |
A VPN is one of the best defensive measures against online tracking. It encrypts and hides your internet activity, including from your internet service provider (ISP), and disguises your true IP address and other device data. Below are three of our favorites.
Price
$3.09–$15.99/mo
$2.19–$17.95/mo
$2.03–$12.99/mo
Max # of connected devices
10
Unlimited
7
# of servers
6,400+ servers in 111 countries
3,200+ servers in 100 countries
Unlisted in 100 countries
VPN protocol
NordLynx (WireGuard), OpenVPN, IKEv2/IPsec
WireGuard, OpenVPN, IKEv2
OpenVPN, IKEv2. WireGuard
Encryption
AES-256-GCM
AES-256-GCM
AES-256
No-logs policy
Headquarters
Panama
The Netherlands
Romania
Netflix access
Learn more
Get NordVPN
Get Surfshark
Get CyberGhost
A data removal service, such as Aura or DeleteMe, can help you with the data removal process and shrink your digital footprint.
These services track down the data brokers who have your data saved and get your data removed. While data brokers are legally obligated to delete your data when asked, some may refuse. Using a data removal service can help put legal pressure on those data brokers.
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| Starting price | From $10.75/mo (billed annually) | From $7.49/mo (billed annually) | From $9.00/mo (billed annually) |
| Max # of people covered | 4 | 4 | 5 |
| Data broker opt-out | |||
| # of site removals | 750+ | 180+ | 30+ |
| Privacy reports | |||
| Real-time alerts | |||
| Learn more | Get DeleteMe | Get Incogni | Get Aura |
Yes, digital footprints do matter. Whether you want to reduce the amount of scams and spam messages you receive or you want to avoid facial recognition pricing, a smaller digital footprint can help you achieve those goals. Keeping your digital footprint smaller can also reduce the amount of information data brokers can collect to sell.
A lot of the information in your digital footprint can be accessed by more people than you would think. Current and potential employers, current and potential customers, your ISP, schools, government agencies, and even cybercriminals all have potential access to your information.
A large digital footprint can be bad, as it opens you up to targeted pricing, scams, spam mail, phishing attempts, potential lost jobs (if an employer finds something they don’t like), privacy invasions, and more. We recommend keeping your footprint small for privacy and security.
The four types of digital footprints are active, passive, private, and commercial. An active digital footprint consists of data that you put online yourself. This includes social media posts, emails, video uploads, and more. A commercial, privacy, and passive digital footprint, however, is collected through your online actions via cookies, web crawlers, and online trackers.
Your digital footprint is a collection of all your online activities that creates a detailed picture of you. Similar to a peeper looking in your window at night, the idea of another person looking at everything you do can weird some people out.
There are tools and online hygiene practices that reduce your footprint and help keep your online privacy. By using a data removal service, you can reduce the size of your digital footprint and reduce your spam, lessen your chance of encountering scams and phishing attempts, and make it harder to track you down.
Removes your data from the web to avoid scams, spam and stalkers
100+ million successful opt-out removals
Provides continued removals every three months
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