What’s your digital footprint?

That digital content is exploding is not earth shattering news. But what I found interesting according to this recent white paper from IDC, is that you only personally have control less than half your total digital footprint. Your “digital shadow” is actually much greater.

"In 2007, the digital universe contained 281,000,000,000 gigabytes, which works out to about 45 gigabytes per person on the planet.

Yet in 2007, when IDC developed the Personal Digital Footprint Calculator, launched this month,vii we discovered that only about half of the digital footprint would be related to individual actions — taking pictures, making VoIP phone calls, uploading videos to YouTube, downloading digital content, and
so on.

We called the remainder “ambient” content. It is digital images of you on a surveillance camera and records in banking, brokerage, retail, airline, telephone, and medical databases. It is information about Web searches and general backup data. It is copies of hospital scans. In other words, it is information about you in cyberspace. Your digital shadow, if you will."

Interested in calculating your own digital footprint? Download the ticker app here.

Here’s a snapshot of mine:



Read the full report, The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe.