Are You Worried About Your Digital Footprint?

In today’s technology-driven world, we all have accepted that a significant amount of data will be generated for nearly every event that we do. In a recent blog entry titled “Social Networking – Appreciating The Information Lifecycle”, I discussed how personal information lives within a social networking environment like Facebook. Now, we’re expanding the focus to cover a typical day’s worth of electronic footprints that are generated for a typical person. What does this have to do with convergence, you ask? First, it is important to analyze the overall goal of converged communications. Simply put, the goal of convergence is to break down barriers of information flow from one system to another. It can mean many things, integrating and including many technologies. We frequently talk about voice, video, and data converging over a single network, but this can obviously be expanded into integrating a voice architecture with other business-critical systems, like ERP. Now, when we talk about integrating multiple, and different systems together, like your PBX, Skype, Twitter, and your IM client… then we have a significant amount of information crossing platforms, and therefore generating quite the footprint of information! Too much, too fast? I’m an avid fan and user of Twitter. In fact, I wish that I could use it more. Quite a few of my friends and colleagues in the VoIP/Convergence space have become avid users as well. From my point of view, there are two groups of users in an application like Twitter: those who use it to communicate interesting ideas, topics, links, etc… and those who use it to post a play-by-play of their day (what they’re doing, etc.) So, I pose the question to my readers: what sort of user are you? I often find myself thinking about the implications of the information that I post. While many of my Facebook friends worry about the potential “Stalkerbook” scenario, does Twitter generate a similar risk? Always Listening Every part of our day is somehow audited and analyzed. From the moment I logged into my workstation, my email, voicemail, and this Network World site to post my article, information is collected. I’m leaving a digital footprint as I type. When I answer my phone, a log in the CDR is created. When I use my credit card to pay for lunch, a transaction log is updated. Do Benefits Outweigh Risks? The beauty of convergence is that it ultimately helps is in ways we don’t even think about. Are we willing to give up that unsolicited “help” to become a more private, personally-secured society?