Manage Your Digital Footprint While Traveling

Today, we create a digital footprint — social media posts and updates, online purchases, and location data — that governments, companies, and others can read and interpret into an accurate picture of us.

Sharing travel plans in real time creates problems. It tells a global audience where you are and when you’ll be away, and it can reveal health or financial details that affect travel.

Avoid disclosing your travel information until necessary, such as when passing through customs or immigration. Take photos inside and keep quiet about where you’re going until you return.

Use disappearing posts, review who can see what on each platform, and avoid repeating personal details like your name, age, location, and interests. The internet has a long memory, so protect your vital information.

Social Media Management on the Go

Managing social media while traveling cuts both ways. Posting in real time lets you share the trip with friends and followers, but it also broadcasts your exact location to people you may not know. Constant posting can also pull you out of the experience itself.

Waiting to post lets you shape a better story of your journey: your best pictures and a short note under each photo, instead of a running commentary for anyone scrolling your feed.

Before anything else, limit who sees the posts you’ve already made public. Privacy comes first: 99% of the people who follow you online aren’t people you’d meet for coffee. Close the places you share.

Data Security Best Practices for Travelers

Securing your devices and data matters, especially as cyber threats rise. A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is one of the easiest protections: it encrypts your connection to the internet so it can’t be intercepted.

This is useful if you need to access your banking details or personal emails while stopping on your trips. It’s unlikely any hacker will gain access to your encrypted feed.

Public Wi-Fi networks are some of the most common ways to be hacked. These are often hotspots where many people are prone to using an unsecured internet connection. The easy way to avoid having your information stolen and your assets protected is to use a VPN to protect your internet feed when possible.

Data theft has been shown to happen most frequently if you’re spotted to use unsecured Wi-Fi on and off frequently. Be sure to make the switch for a safer, more reasonable coverage at a certain price range to protect yourself.

Building a Positive Digital Footprint

Building your personal brand as you explore the world doesn’t simply mean chronicling your adventures. It’s about thoughtfully sharing the moments that tell a story to the people who are discovering your content. Have fun curating a feed that shows off all the great food you’re eating, the people you meet, and any other unique travel experiences tied to your interests! It’s a great way to show people what you value in life, which may be different from what they’re used to seeing. People, even those who don’t know you personally, may feel more connected to you because they’re interested in and can relate to the type of content you’re putting out there. Basically, sharing is good. But also, share responsibly. When you travel, the locals and the places you visit are sharing something unique about the world with you. So respect these communities when you include them in your online content. (Yes, include. Because it’s exploitative to put them on display.) Don’t misrepresent a people or a culture, use language and images that perpetuate harmful stereotypes about a place or a community, or tell a story that positions you as the heroic traveller and characters you meet as helpless, impoverished locals whose lives are uplifted by your generous tourist spending and disruptive presence, ruining the environment and local people’s way of life. But also, just don’t do it, okay? Oh, and lastly—because I can’t really do a complete three-part series on personal branding without talking about how so many of us are practically living online during this pandemic—be nice to people on the Internet. Engage with your audience (+ potential audience) online beyond stalking their profile to see if they’ve used this info in a previous post orstory! How you decide to respond (or not) to comments on your posts, what you share (aside from your own original content) on your page—from #repost-ed content on food or local businesses you want to support or #ad posts to tagged photos and posts in your IG stories—and little (or big, if that’s your thing) details you put out about your life online all contribute to people’s understanding and assumptions of who you are and what you represent.

Understanding Your Digital Footprint

A digital footprint is the trail of data you create while using the internet. It includes both active and passive data creation. Active data are the things you share intentionally—social media updates, blog posts, and comments on blog posts or articles. The passive data are collected without the user’s knowledge—the websites a user has visited, their cookies, and their browsing history or “clickstream.” It is all the data you leave in your path as you travel around the internet.

Traveling and living abroad also can significantly complicate your digital footprint. Most often, these opportunities allow people to meet different social and cultural groups of people. This typically means much more online activity (new content creation and engagement) and makes their account activity very easy to find. This opportunity also introduces both reputation management and privacy and digital security challenges. More content creates more opportunities for people (the audience), proactively or incidentally, to find and scrutinize content. There are privacy and digital security challenges because people traveling often use public Wi-Fi accounts, which can make online identities, and accounts, more susceptible to hacking and fraud.

Also, the way you conduct yourself on the internet, in general, is very important for reputation management. It sounds simple, but thinking about whether you should share something or not before it is shared can save a lot of headache and potential damage down the road. In particular, travelers should be aware of the audience “hearing” the shared message. There are striking regional perceptual differences about what web content is “acceptable” or not acceptable on social (or any digital) media. Certain pictures or content are fine in one region but may scare or offend people in a different region.

The Importance of Online Privacy While Traveling

When we travel, we tend to post that information somewhere online, whether it’s a destination in our navigation app or a “check-in” on Facebook. Sometimes we even post pictures in real-time to our various social media audiences. Attacks can be crimes of opportunity. In this case, sharing your location may indicate to a criminal that you aren’t home, or that you’re far away from your hotel (which you also might have checked in to), increasing their likelihood of committing theft.

Many people polled by the security research firm, Kaspersky, have reported that their data have been compromised while on vacation at a hotel, hostel, or Air BnB. People’s information was likely taken by connecting to what the identity thieves thought was secure, but free WiFi, usually in hotels, airports, and cafes. It’s likely the thieves joined the same network and started dumping the network data packets until they gathered all the sensitive information they needed.

Identity theft could follow you for many years down the road. People could use this information to take out lines of credit in your name, destroying your credit score and potentially leaving you with the bill.

In today’s interconnected world, it’s important to manage your digital footprint while traveling abroad. With soaring numbers of people becoming “at risk” as they rely on handy smartphones and other devices to make travel easier and more fun, the issue of privacy looms large. In fact, it is probably larger than anyone can ever know. Effective measures to manage this exposure may be to use a virtual private network (VPN) to encrypt your Internet connection, so that bad actors such as the hacker community can’t access or read your data. This approach is especially important when one uses public Wi-Fi networks in airports or cafes. Also, be mindful of what information you post on your social media accounts. It might be a good rule to only “check-in” or “post a pic” of your location after you have rebased to another (safe) location. Posting travel updates or photos is a fun part of the travel experience, but perhaps edit your privacy settings so that only close friends and family may see these. There will probably be the guests who should never see your “real-time location” data, as there may be unwanted guests (or gate crashers).