Digital identity refers to the set of activities a person engages in online that help define who they are digitally. It is constructed through personal data, information published online by the user or others, and tracks left consciously or unconsciously. A user can have professional, private or other types of digital identifiers. To manage their digital identity, a user should carefully choose identifiers for different activities, limit access to published information, and regularly check their online image and reputation.

1. Digital Identity
What is it?
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Dr. Thouraya Daouas

2. Digital identity
• The set of activities you do on Internet contributes in
defining your digital identity.
• It’s constructed by many elements:
– Personal data associated with your profile.
– Information you publish on Internet.
– Information about you that others publish.
– Tracks you leave consciously or not.
• User can have three types of identifier:
– Professional or institutional related to a professional activity.
– Private identifiers for personal use (social network, online selling,
mail, online banking, etc.)
Dr. Thouraya Daouas 2Digital Identity

3. Digital identity
• How to master it?
– User should choose sensibly its identifier to be used
according to his activity;
– User limits the access to the information which he
publishes;
– User checks regularly his image on Web or e-
reputation.
Dr. Thouraya Daouas 3Digital Identity

4. Authentification
• Procedure which checks that the information
about connection supplied is correct (identifier
and password, fingerprints, etc.).
• Some rules are important to respect:
– Keep secret the password.
– Choose a complex password (Combining necessarily
small letters, capital letters, numbers and symbols).
Should not have evident meaning.
– Should not usurp an identity.
Dr. Thouraya Daouas 4Digital Identity

5. Configuration of profile
• Connection identifier can be associated to a profile
containing photos, personal information and
preferences.
• It is possible to configure information access:
– Public: accessible for everyone and referenced in search
engines.
– Restricted: accessible for authorized community and not
referenced.
• In case of emails, a signature could be put at the end of the
email body or a visit card could be joint to the email.
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6. Digital tracks
• What could we find in the file properties?
– Date, Time, Author name, Revision number, Camera model, etc.
• What can we know about the user identity?
– Each connected computer has an IP address given to user by the
Internet service provider which has to keep during one year the list of
connections and the information allowing to identify the Internet
user.
– When we consult a web page, the browser sends a request to the
server to get back the data (texts, images, etc.) to download. Server
can keep track and follow so the browsing on the site.
– In email header are stored a series of IP addresses describing servers
which can supply indications on sender geographical localization.
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7. e-Reputation
• e-Reputation or digital reputation is the image can be made
of a person through the Web.
• We must be aware that:
– Everybody can publish on Web without any control: on a blog or a
social network, by participating in a discussion forum, by publishing a
site to a host, etc.
– We loose the control of an information published with a " public
access ": from the moment where an information is public, it can be
indexed by search engines and copied out in their mask memory. It
can put several months disappearing.
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