Internet Footprints

October 3, 2020.

As I did my homework and relaxed from the weight of this week and September on my shoulders, I softly looked at the website of passwords.google.com in the guise of an Anti-Google privacy mindset. To my surprise, however, I saw that I had lots of passwords that I didn't even remember using at all, and some passwords leading to sites that are no longer functioning. This would then head me towards Brave Browser's password manager and check to see if most of them are still there, and there I found that some of the sites I visited still work, and I migrated them with new passwords to my LastPass account.

This small piece of history led me to learn that whatever you do on the Internet will leave a lasting impact, may it be a password manager, a site that tracks your footprints, or even as simple as the email you first used at all.

The Internet is a group of computers interconnected through wires and systems. This meant that whatever happens within the Internet, it will be recorded somewhere in someone's computer, and this allows you to see how long have you been on the Internet, or how deep your privacy has been breached.

These "Internet Footprints" is something that you will have to search for yourself when you see your browser and see that you have been using its password manager feature. If you had, you will be able to see a small snapshot of your world, as those password managers are limited in scope, depending on when it was created and if it's online. Luckily, Google Chrome's password manager saves on Google account itself, so if you had it since 2012 (hypothetically), you can get into your past and see how many sites you had logged in.

Luckily, there's been sites like Mine, which helped me find active sites that contain my email, so it mitigated some of my problems of learning which accounts are still active, after all.

Looking back, it's making me shudder on how I had been too naive before. I have some accounts in sites that claimed to be able to pay BTC once, and some accounts were duplicated a lot.

I'm very happy now that I am using LastPass instead of any browser's password manager. I'm not going to tell you to use LastPass, as there are better alternatives, but until today, I have appreciated its use. I do admit that the mention of having a randomized password per account is a good thing to have in this day and age where experienced individuals can open your computer despite your privacy and security measures.

We're all hackers here, and we hack the Internet by securing ourselves first before moving on to bigger pastures depending on your morality. You can't hide from the Internet forever, I admit, but when we can, it is a good thing to have at all.

Unlike regular footprints, the only way to clean these "Internet Footprints" we have is by a wide-spread deletion of your interaction, including those that were archived and the data that collectors have taken from you to ensure your browsing experience is as comfortable as possible.

If you want to see more of these, feel free to stick around, and see more of my articles. I'm moving away from cryptocurrency-based articles to a more generalized style of writing about life, technology, fiction, and video games. Expect less of cryptocurrency articles from me as time passes on since even college is starting to take a hit on my writing speed.

If you want to use some of my referrals, I have made an article specifically for referrals only. If you want to donate to me, I accept BCH, LBC, XMR, and other smaller cryptocurrencies.

This is Rowan, signing off.