Once upon a time, in the land of Great Britain, Amanda woke up to the sun shining on a bright Monday morning. Before she got out of bed, she opened the BBC weather app on her phone  to check the weather for the day ahead.  She had started leaving her trail of digital breadcrumbs.......

She took a shower, made some breakfast, brushed her teeth and left the house.  Amanda used Facebook to send a message to her friend telling him she was almost at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, United Kingdom.

Her friend replied:  “No you’re not!  Your message location says you’re still at home!”

Oops. Amanda was busted!

She tapped her Oyster Card at the Underground Station and read the news on The Guardian app using the Wifi available underground.

Arriving at Russell Square Station, she bought coffee at a cafe using her contactless card and made her way to SOAS for her first lecture of the day.

Amanda was blissfully unaware that her morning schedule had created a trail of “Digital Breadcrumbs.”  This means, she can be traced and tracked through the apps she accessed and the technology she used.  But what does that really mean?  Who has access to this information? And can it be used against us?

Are we all blissfully unaware like Amanda?  And should we be worried?

Welcome to Digital Breadcrumbs by George Philip, Jennifer Anne Lazo, Rooham Jamali and Rudy Al Jaroodi. Our podcast explores the digital trails or digital footprints we create in our daily lives. 

The majority of applications we use require our location information. We willingly tag ourselves in specific locations through social media platforms, and freely use contactless cards and debit cards, which give retailers, banks and various other organisations information about our daily movements.  We are constantly monitored on CCTV and everything we research online is data being collected or stored.  In this episode, we’ll be talking to lecturers and students to discover the real cost of our digital footsteps.

So first of all, what is a digital trail?  We interviewed Dr. Elisa Oreglia, a lecturer in Global Digital Cultures at SOAS, to find out more about our digital footprints.

Dr. Elisa Oreglia: A “digital trail” is a trace you leave behind you. It’s almost like Breadcrumbs. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally when you use a mobile phone; but also when you use a computer, or when you use really any kind of technology that has a chip in it.

Basically, when you have a phone, you have a series of censors and you have this constant background communication between the phone and the cell towers, but also if its connected online between the phone and the internet so there are all these apps that are getting information about your phone, about your environment. 

Narrator: Dr. Oreglia tells us that all this communication is sent elsewhere, it doesn’t just stay on your phone.  And it’s constant.  It accumulates over time.  But where is it being stored? According to Dr. Oreglia, it is going to several different places. The signal on your mobile phone tells your mobile phone network where you are.

EA: But then you have (you know) your GPS, that might be signals that go through a satellite, so it's a system to position your phone.

Narrator: She goes on to tell us about how information in your apps is stored locally and via the internet to the app's creators. The information can be dispersed through Wifi, or through your phone’s operator.  Basically, there are a lot of apps, a lot of background processes and often, we don’t know exactly what they’re doing.

We then proceeded to ask Dr. Oreglia about what happens to data we have researched.

EA: When you do a search on google, that information goes through Google Servers. First of all it has to travel to a variety of internet service providers and then it gets stored into Google Servers. And they can really be anywhere in the world.

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