Digital Tattoos Revisited

In an earlier post, I wrote about a personal data mine that I conducted in thinking about my digital tattoo-the imprint that I have left on the digital world, and how much information about me was truly and readily available on the internet. As the concept of digital tattoos denote, what we post and interact with online can be very difficult to erase, and almost always will leave traces (as with a tattoo, fully removing one’s past actions online can be challenging and time-consuming). I wanted to do a little bit more digging, and was turned onto this Digital Tattoo project website from the University of British Columbia. The site contains a variety of different resources, from quizzes about which aspects of one’s digital tattoo they seek to address or learn more about, to videos and articles and even teaching resources related to that creation and maintenance of a digital tattoo. Albeit a beginner’s reflection, here is what I found:

Digital Tattoo Basics

Overall, the articles and tutorials on the University of British Columbia website communicate the importance of an overall sense of awareness of the consequences of one’s actions online. There are many ways that we leave a mark as part of our digital tattoo, including…

-Becoming a content creator, which can seem like a dream career for many young students, but can also open up dangers related to mental and physical safety.

-Scanning QR codes in a restaurant or shop can take you to third-party sites that can collect data via cookies (their tip-browse in private mode)

-Sharenting, through which parents are establishing a digital tattoo for their children at a VERY early age. This article also discusses some of the darker consequences of sharenting, such as a projection that sharenting will be the cause of $800 million in online fraud by the year 2030.

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Sharenting can be one way that a person's digital tattoo is established even from their earliest days.

Now some might ask, isn’t there a clear line between one’s intent with what they post and how it might be taken by viewers? Turns out, it might not be as clear as we think. Gen Z students in this video name a variety of different resources that they used for non-academic information, and most are social media sites, such as Reddit, YouTube, etc. This is an important concept to keep in mind, because this is a trend that will likely continue, where what people post on these types of websites is more and more readily accessed as a regular source of information. What we put out there on these sites is a component of a digital tattoo, and some students in the video even reference using these resources as a place to get both opinions and information. Students (and adults as well) must therefore realize that what they put into social sites may be accessed and evaluated/used as an influence by others, even if the original poster did not intended it as such.

Maintaining Professionalism Online

The university also discusses professional profiles, or the collection of all professionally-relevant information found about someone online, in this video. 

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The video mentions that it is possible to leverage yourself by becoming more visible and achieving new connections within your field by using social media, so long as you align what you post and create with who you are trying to reach and how you are trying to present yourself. However, the more one ‘puts themself’ out into different sites, the more likely they are to be exposed to privacy concerns, trolling, etc., and of course there is the question of which sites and what to post that could potentially be used by an employer to determine a candidate’s qualifications for a job. Having an online presence, however, can be a crucial aspect in trying to find a job, as this article from Workello discusses.

Protecting Identity

One important side of this that I honestly hadn’t thought much about is the rise of connected devices, or as this article references, part of the Internet of Things. The article goes on to discuss how widespread the use of home assistants, fitness trackers, etc. has become, and how these devices can be potential sources of violations of privacy, or where these devices can be hacked. The author of the article points out the importance of using these devices if they are truly offering an improvement to life, and that owners must understand the settings and data collection that occurs with that device. Because wearable technology and smart homes are going to continue to become more popular into the future, these are questions that users must remember before they add those additional layers of connectedness into their own lives.

An important aspect for students is their financial identity-perhaps not something traditionally thought of as a digital tattoo, but something that can have a huge impact on one’s own life. This video discusses the vulnerability of students to financial identity theft, due to their clean or beginning credit history, and potential lack of familiarity with how to protect one’s finances. The video goes on to suggest students should put security alerts in place, shred financial documents, and employ lock IDs and antivirus software as manners of precaution-although these are honestly actions that could benefit all people.

Removing Yourself from the Internet

In the event that you are attempting to completely scrub yourself from the internet, the site does warn that this can be a VERY difficult undertaking, and that truly complete removal might be almost impossible. However, this video does pose a handful of steps one can take. The steps suggested include Googling oneself, and setting up an alert anytime a new instance is generated on the internet, hiding social media accounts, using deletion sites like justdelete.me to find remaining instances of records online, and then contacting webmasters to remove any remaining traces. Again, the video posits that even all of these precautions still might not be enough, but they would be steps for those who are looking to greatly modify/remove pieces of their digital tattoo. This could benefit all people in at least being more aware of where their information can be found, especially in old social media sites which might no longer be used, and help ensure that the ‘artistry’ of their digital tattoo remains solely in their hands, and that old information or accounts are not vulnerable to being infiltrated by others.