Unit 1 · Topic 04 · Digital Safety and Citizenship
Ms. Rao wrote four words on the board: Search for yourself.
Anaya thought it was the easiest lab period of the year.
It took her nine minutes to stop feeling clever.
Anaya typed her username, ArtsyAnaya09, into the search box.
The first result was her drawing account. Every picture she had uploaded since Class 2 was still sitting there, in order, with dates. The wobbly elephant. The Diwali rangoli. A drawing of Pixel with angry eyebrows.
"That's fine," she said. "They're good."
The third result was not a drawing. It was a screenshot somebody had posted of a comment she had written on the school blog last month: "Maths homework is boring and there is way too much of it."
Anaya remembered that comment. She also remembered deleting it, about twenty minutes later.
"I deleted that," she said.
"You deleted yours," said Kabir, from the next computer. "That's somebody's photo of yours."
Pixel's fan gave a slow, knowing groan.
Ms. Rao came over and read the screen without any expression at all. Anaya waited to be told off. Instead Ms. Rao pointed at the dates running down the drawing account.
"Two years of your work, all in one place," she said. "Somebody who has never met you could learn your style, your city, when you go online, and what annoys you. Some of that you meant to leave. Some of it you didn't."
Anaya scrolled to the bottom of her own page. At the very end sat a drawing from Class 2 that she now thought was terrible.
She could delete that one. She could not delete the screenshot.
So she did the only thing left. She wrote a new comment on the blog, a better one, about a maths puzzle she had actually enjoyed. Ms. Rao read it and said nothing, which from Ms. Rao is quite a lot.
Your digital footprint is the trail you leave behind online. It has two halves.
The active half is what you choose to put there: posts, comments, photos, drawings, videos. The passive half is what gets recorded whether you think about it or not: what you searched for, which videos you liked, when you logged in, which device you used.
Both halves last. Delete removes your copy — not everybody else's. A screenshot, a download or a forward is a new copy that you do not own and cannot reach.
So a footprint is not a mistake. It is a record. The useful question is what you want that record to say about you in two years.
With a grown-up beside you, search your own name and any username you use, and look at the first ten results.
Make two lists on paper: things you chose to put there, and things you did not expect to find.
Then pick one thing you would change, and say what you would do differently next time.
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