Guides: Online Data and Privacy: Your Digital Footprint

Digital Footprint

Your are Being Tracked

There's no way to get around it. Unless you've taken specific steps to secure yourself, you are being tracked online. By whom? By the owners of the websites you're using at any given moment, but also by a large array of advertisers, social media companies, government entities, and others. These trackers and ads also slow down page loading times and may affect battery life on your device.

The tools on this page will help you learn more about the information being gathered on you, and help you to block trackers you don't want tracking you.

Not all trackers and ads are negative, though. Websites need to be able to track some aspects of user experience in order to run their sites properly and generate revenue to keep the lights on. Keep this in mind when choosing and implementing tools to block trackers and ads.

[Adapted from UW Bothell's Online Privacy and Security Toolkit. Licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 License.]

sections of this guide borrowed from the University of Portland

Digital Persona

What contact information is available for you?

Doxxing Yourself on the Internet
A tip sheet developed by the New York Times information security team to help you see what others can find about you. Includes tips for Google searching and links to some people finder sites that regularly appear in search results.
What Does Facebook Know About You?
What Does Google Know About You?

What's your overall profile?

Apply Magic Sauce
Discover what your digital footprints reveal about your psychological profile.
Predictive World
Predictions about you generated by an algorithm developed by the University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre.

Alternatives

Secure Browsing and alternate browsers

HTTPS Everywhere - A Firefox, Chrome, and Opera extension that encrypts your communications with many major websites.

DuckDuckGo - A search engine that doesn't collect, store, or share any of your personal information

Brave - Blocks privacy-invasive ads & trackers. It blocks third-party data storage. It protects from browser fingerprinting. It upgrades every webpage possible to secure https connections. And it does all this by default.

Tor Browser - Anonymizes your web traffic using the Tor network, making it easy to protect your identity online. Caveats: Browsing the web over Tor is slower than on the regular Internet, and some major web services block Tor users.

Data Breaches

Have I Been Pwned?
Check if you have an account that has been compromised in a data breach, and which ones.

How to Track the Trackers

NOTE: These apps might interfere with library database sites, and you might have to disable the app to use a database effectively.

Privacy Badger
From Electronic Frontier Foundation, a browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera browsers that blocks ads and trackers.
DuckDuckGo Privacy App
Shows you a Privacy Grade rating when you visit a website (A-F). The Privacy Grade is scored automatically based on the prevalence of hidden tracker networks, encryption availability, and website privacy practices.