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The professor of University Camilo José Cela, Laura Cuesta Cano, has analysed the dangers of leaving a digital fingerprint on the Internet, particularly in young people, accustomed to documenting all aspects of their lives with smartphones and uploading everything online, in an article for the digital platform The Conversation.
This fingerprint, as Cuesta explains, consists of “all the traces we leave when browsing the web: the comments we make on social media, photographs or videos that we upload, likes in publications, downloads of apps, Skype calls, use of instant messaging, email records … an online history that can potentially be seen by other people or stored in a database”.
Laura Cuesta considers it a problem that this term is not given the importance and relevance it deserves, since young people “have the habit of documenting everything on phones, both good and bad, and thus, what in the past would have just been ‘a bad night’, can nowadays potentially dog them for the rest of their lives”.
The UCJC professor considers it essential for parents to set an example to their children on how to use the Internet responsibly and safely. “It is increasingly necessary to develop habits of basic “hygiene” in the field of cybersecurity and this is something that must be learnt at home and adults must set an example and educate our children digitally”.