Your Online Footprint

image from sing365.com

When you run a Google search for my name, an Amazon review for the album "rear end" by Mercedes shows up that I supposedly wrote in 2001. In the review, I supposedly said:

"This is NASTY music! I can't believe I wasted money on thi- OMG! OMG! I WASTED (dollar ammount)!! GAH! neway, the beats (...), and the lyrics are just too raunchy and don't even make sense! She'd be better off in the porn industry. GO BACK! GO BACK! (and give me back my fourteen dollars)"

Nothing too bad. However, I don't want to associate with it. Especially since it's the very first item that comes up on Google when anybody searches me. The big problem with this review is, I didn't write this.


I didn't have an Amazon account until 2004. My friend Ahmed wrote this as a joke. He denies ever doing it, but if you look at "my" profile, the nickname is his real name. The bigger problem with this is: it's eight years later, he lives in Texas and even if he were to finally admit he did it, he doesn't remember how to log in to remove the review. Unfortunately, that review will probably forever stand as a "scar" to me. I hope that it doesn't negatively colour the perception others have of me, but it's out of my control now.

That was an isolated incident. For the most part, we have complete control over what we contribute to the Internet. However, most of us don't always take precaution before we post. And in the age of "Web 2.0", the problem only gets worse when it's so easy to Tweet too much information or post a picture you think only your Facebook friends will see until it "magically" ends up in plain view of everyone.

What if your mother were to find this stuff? What if a future employer found this stuff? Employers do look up potential new employees on Google to find things you may not want them to see. I remember sitting in an informational with someone at an advertising agency with hiring power. This person would regularly search the names of applicants on Google to see what they could find. If this person found anything bad, they would print it out, and when the applicant came in for their interview, this person would present all the dirt on the applicant they found and use it as examples of why they wouldn't be hired. Imagine sitting in a job interview where the interviewer was presenting drunken pictures of yourself that they found on Facebook. The agony!

To me, one of the highest profile cases of falling victim to your online footprint occured in the murder trial of Stephanie Rengel. The girl convicted of nagging her boyfriend to kill Stephanie left an online footprint the size of Big Foot for the prosecution to present to the court. MSN conversations, text messages and Facebook wall posts flew right in the face of her "I only said it a few times and never meant it," defense.

Not even the delete button can save a person (or in this next case, a company) from falling victim to their own online footprint. Back in 2006, a website popped up called "All I Want For Xmas Is A PSP". Supposedly, it was made by a bunch of guys who were trying to convince their friend's mom of buying her son a PSP. However, the Internet community got suspicious and revealed that it was in fact Sony that made the site. Sony deleted all traces of the campaign, but savvy users saved everything. To this day, the video remains as a scar on the face of the company.

I've spent most of this entry talking about the bad side of our online footprints, but the idea of an online footprint in general is fascinating to me. What about the millions of abandoned blogs? Most of those don't get deleted, they just stay there as "online artifacts" of sorts. Maybe I'm alone in this, but sometimes I'll read a blog that hasn't been updated in years and wonder, "What happened to the user?" Why did they stop? Where did they go? Where are they now?

We can even take this discussion into the afterlife. Odds are, everything you post on the Internet will stay there longer than you stay on the Internet. What then happens to everything online you left behind? There's been a lot of hot-button discussion as to what to do about social networking profiles when that person passes away, but we'll save that discussion for another day.

Before I go, I'll leave you with this question: what does your online footprint look like?