Blogger Challenge 2: Feet

This week, challenge 2 is called "heads and feet". We have to create an avatar (heads) and then look into our digital footprint (feet). I'm going to post separately on both so this is my post about my digital footprint. In the instructions for this challenge, there was a video about how each everyone in the world has a digital footprint, which begins before we are born. It showed all the different things which contribute to this, such as sonograms (before we were bron), social networking, bank cards and more! It was kinda scary to see how much information about me people around the world have access to... In the challenge we were told to google ourselves to see what came up, so I put in my name and home town first. The first item that came up was from the local secondary school (I don't go to that school) and it had mentioned my name in an article about a debating competition I was in. Further down there was an article from Intel about energy and there was a picture of me when I was in primary school along with my name and school name. Then I googled my name and my school name...more stuff came up on debating; there were things from my school website and also from my mini-company website. I google my name with Twitter & Facebook but there were too many results...I'm sure if I looked long enough I'd find myself though! At the moment I'm trying to think of all the websites I've ever joined; Hotmail & Yahoo for email, Facebook, Twitter & Bebo for social networking, Youtube for...entertainment? and loads more! I can't even remember them all now, but I know there must be hundreds. Even websites like O2 & Meteor aswell..wow! As a rule, I generally only fill in the spaces necessary to join the website...things like name, DOB & email. I never fill out the spaces that I don't have to fill out...they don't need that information! Also, I'm very particular about the email addresses I give out. I have two and I use them for different things...I hate getting email from places I join or things like Facebook so I give them one email address, while the other is for emailing people and such(I rairly get spam/junk mail there as a result!). I never really thought too much about my digital footprint before now, but now that I'm aware of it I'm defninitely going to be very careful about the information I put out there about myself! You never know who's looking...