---
# System prepended metadata

title: Privacy Footprint

---

# Privacy Footprint
### My identity
![](https://i.imgur.com/5146Sdj.jpg)
![](https://i.imgur.com/JNi1U4B.png)


### Browser
![](https://i.imgur.com/8zaIRlv.png)


### Google
![](https://i.imgur.com/QbTlxkw.png)
![](https://i.imgur.com/D1AOysP.png)
![](https://i.imgur.com/4iqh8u4.png)
![](https://i.imgur.com/8itr1G3.png)

### Social Networks

![](https://i.imgur.com/OTyaFIE.png)


#### Response
I was surprised as to how much information I could find about myself just by googling my name. One always hears about their digital footprint, but I had never considered how easy it was to find information about myself that I thought nobody knew about myself. One of the first results that popped up when I searched my name was a presentation I did in the fifth grade on plants, which is highly random. I had previously disabled my ad setting in google, so when it came to looking at my privacy setting there, it seemed not to be as much details about me.
As I began writing this reading response, I was thinking about baking cookies, and as I told my roommates that, I got an ad for Pillsbury cookie dough on Instagram (the cookie dough that I currently have in my fridge. My initial response was that Facebook is listening to my conversations, but after doing the New Atlas reading, I realized that that is not possible. Various studies have shown that there is no possible way for Facebook or other apps to eavesdrop on your conversations. Although our phones don't listen to our conversations, they still gather information about us in different ways, and that is concerning. The  "data points the system has on you to determine what you should see at any given point" allows applications like Facebook to show you targeted ads without listening to your conversations, and that is why sometimes ads are scarily accurate.


 I think it is so interesting how we are aware that our phones collect so much data about our personal lives, and we do not really much about it. Almost everyone I know gets creeped out about all the amount out there about them, but nobody ever stops to check their privacy settings. Many tracking mechanisms exist on websites and devices, such as "cookies, web bugs, JavaScript and browser fingerprinting" (Kernighan 2017). These tracks allow advertisers to get personal information about users and use it to target ads towards them. Online users need to be aware and become more informed as to how to reduce tracking. Users can reject cookies when using websites, but many refuse to do so, or sometimes servers make it hard to find the "do not track" feature.