Your Digital Footprint Is Muddy - my response
A blog post by Mitch Joel "Your Digital Footprint Is Muddy" outlines what happens when you say one thing in the physical world and do something on the back channel showing that you are really doing something else.
The post and the comments go over some old ground and most companies have concluded that they want to recruit people who have a life and are professional.
Without a doubt one very small aspect of a digital (footprint) opens up the opportunity for detailed tracking and this in turn would enable anyone to exploit the differences between expressed behavioural and actual behaviours. However, what make us human is the ability to change our minds as we learn, grow up and gain experience.
In finance and investing we often see a phase that implies that past performance (behaviour) is not a good prediction of future performance (behaviour). What will become interesting from digital footprint analysis in the future is that are we more predictable than we think? Here is a previous post on that topic