Complete manual/38/en

‘Digital traces’ also includes pieces of data that are created about your content that is mostly invisible to us, commonly called 'metadata'. These traces are almost always passively created, without you necessarily realising it, or consenting to it. For example, your browsing habits and IP address are shared amongst websites you visit and services you use in order to track your behavior and try to sell you products through advertising. Along with the content you create such as text messages, social media updates, and photos, there are also trillions of relatively small bits of metadata created and stored in the digital world every time you send an email or surf the web, or when your mobile phone or any other digitally networked device you use sends information to the Internet. These ‘digital traces’ can include your name, location, contacts, photos, messages, tweets and like, but can also be the brand of your computer, length of your phone calls and information about which websites you visit. In order to understand the concept of digital traces and how they add to and shape our larger, cumulative ‘digital shadow', it’s useful to break down what kinds of data are being created, how they are created, how they are collected, and who is collecting them. As mentioned above, when we use the term 'digital traces', we are talking about three types of data: content, metadata and noise.