IDC estimated last year that every person on this planet has a digital footprint of 45 gigabytes. However, if you take into account that not everybody has access to a computer or the internet, I reckon you can easily double this figure per person. The same study also states that they expect the digital universe to grow to 1,800 exabytes by 2011 and that User Generated Content will nearly account for half of it.
What's in a number you will say, well it means that our personal digital footprint is growing by the day. Unfortunately, most people still remain (blissfully?) ignorant of the danger of this. We're all into social networking and happily post information about our personal lives in the cloud. Who we are, what we are doing, who we know...but do we really think before we start? A recent study by careerbuilder, a US based online job board found that "34% of hiring managers chose not to hire a candidate based on what they found in profiles".
Even when you carefully select your friends and connections, there is still Milgram's "six degrees of separation" theory which states that everyone is no more than six "steps" away from each person on the planet. Urban myth or not, how many times have you coined the phrase: "Oh, you know XYZ, it's such a small world"? Social networking sites like Linkedin or Facebook have indeed accelerated this "small world feeling" but do we really know who XYZ is? We don't give our credit card details to an unknown person either, but we do publish a lot of sensitive information about ourselves on the net. And the thing is, once it is on the internet, it stays on the internet...
Thanks to Web 2.0 we now have a plethora of channels where we can express ourselves, publish stories and share our lives with the world. However, the side effect of our social "exhibitionism" is that we make it relatively easy for others to watch us...
Conclusion of this post, don't let your digital dirt jeopardize your real identity! Watch out what kind of information you publish and with whom you connect. You could call this personal censorship and it might sound contradictory in these times of "sharism" but remember that your digital footprint is not easily erased.
If you want to find out more about the dos and dont's in social networking, just check this article.
