Capturing Digital Footprints

Hello Everyone,

In today's world, it's very common for any organization to track and store digital footprints of users who visits or register themselves into their system/website or a mobile app.

Digital Footprints: Digital footprint or digital shadow refers to one's unique set of traceable digital activities, actions, contributions and communications that are manifested on the Internet or on digital devices - from wikipedia.org

As my job as back-end developer, I too have to store information of users who register into the website. The term "registration" could be:

1. User adding their email address to get email notification.
2. Capturing their browser cookies once they click "Accept" towards a pop-up or a irritating footer which simply says: "By using this site, you agree to our use of cookies. Please read our privacy policy.", and no one bothers to read that.
3. When user actually enters their personal information, without knowing what, how much and whom they are sharing.

I track these information from a user, when the get into the website:

• IP Address: An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label assigned to each device connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing - from wikipedia.org
• Mobile/Desktop/Tablet Tracking: To see if user is visiting the website from phone, desktop or tablet.
• Device Name: This include whether user is using iPhone, iPad, Pixel, Nexus or any other device out there.
• OS (Operating System): Which operating system is installed in the user's system. If you hack mac-os-x and have installed that on your desktop, that's where "they" will know, about jailbreak.
• Browser: Here we get to know, user was using either Google Chrome/Firefox/Opera/Safari or any other browsers.
• Timestamps: At what time user was doing digital activities. They are stored in Year-Month-Day Hour-Minute-Second format. Hence, very precise!

This above information is very least, there's a lot of information that leaves your system, when you access anything on the Internet.

I've created a Github Gist, where I'm showing how those information gets saved into the the database. In this Gist, I've added snippet of Laravel (PHP Framework), which gives a basic overview on how to integrate that on your website as well.

Also, you can see that I've used a feature called boot events, these events gets called when an entry is created, updated and deleted[1] into the system.

References:

1. Nothing gets deleted ever. There's a term called soft delete, which means the record gets hidden from the user, which gives them an impression that the delete button actually deleted that content.