Footprints in The (Digital) Sand

With a lot of the summer behind us and school returning, we’ve some inside time on the horizon. With this, brings the tendency to spend more time online, on social media and interacting with others by use of our smartphones. Is there a risk though of our digital interactions coming back to haunt us in the real world? Could careless language or photos online bite us years later, irrespective of the context at the time? Of course, the answer is yes. But how do we avoid it, and is there a period after which we can exhale, free from past web transgressions?

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter; the scope for sharing ideas, experiences and inspiration online is a broad one. Facebook alone sees around 300 million photos posted every single day on average. In just one minute, the platform will experience more than half a million comments. Plus, with its close to three billion users, practically anyone can look at and make judgements about any and all of it. Let’s say you’re responsible for one of those comments, and let’s also pretend you’ve typed something in the heat of the moment which you now regret and would like very much to erase. It happens, right? We’ve all said things we don’t mean before.

In the event you don’t read this article any further, you should absorb at least this: anything you post online should be treated like it’s going to be available forever. Indefinitely. Without end. Until the heat death of the universe. Even if you delete whatever it is you’re trying to make go away, different social media companies (and even internet providers) have different rules and regulations on how long they keep that data. Even with that in mind, internet archive sites will take “snapshots” of how websites look at any given point in time, for the purpose of nostalgia and protecting information. If whatever you’ve posted on your favorite platform gets swept into an archive, there’s essentially no getting rid of it.

This also doesn’t tackle the biggest cause of our ill-considered words or photos coming back to bite us. The humble screenshot. Now, there are apps which give you a heads up if someone has screenshot your content - Snapchat being one of them, but then what? Simply knowing is only half the battle; you then have to hope the person on the other end listens to reason. You’re also not protected, in a world where everything has a camera, from people simply taking a photo of their phone with another device. It happens, and it’s more or less undetectable to the victim.

It’s not all scary internet boogymen though. Being that there is some level of anonymity in the vastness of the internet, the chances are slim that someone will happen across something we’ve posted by chance alone. The sheer volume of photos and opinions being posted at any one time means things do get buried quite quickly. Someone actively looking for something, such as an employer for example, could very feasibly use your posting history to make a judgement about your viability. While I do feel like it’s unfair to hold people’s feet to the fire for viewpoints they’ve grown away from over say, a decade or more, cancel culture today tells us that it can and does happen. Just be aware, be mindful and be prepared to own anything you type, as the line between the internet and real life grows ever more blurred.