In a nutshell, digital footprinting is similar to that of profiling potential employees in a company setting. When a company profiles its potential employees, it will often try to dive into their individual performances, skillsets, work and academic history, and personal background. The catch that sets digital footprinting apart from profiling, though, is that it is usually conducted without consent and often with ill intentions in mind. When an ethical hacker profiles a company, they are often contracted to perform penetration tests. In order to make a successful breach attempt, the more information the testers know, the better. So in order to carry it out, a hacker or tester will, to the best of their abilities, attempt to collect all sorts of information about this company through all possible sources; this includes WHOIS for domain ownership lookup, NSLOOKUP for domain IP address lookup, HTML header for software version lookup, or browser cookies for the user sessions and preferences information. However, it is important to note that digital footprinting is not really just limited to these technology fields. Email, text messages, and instant messages read receipts are also a form of digital footprinting. Letting the sender know that the recipient has indeed opened the email as a way to deliver time-sensitive information and hold the recipients accountable for any potential delays. Also, in our evergrowing world of technologies, live ink signatures are fading out of existence, and instead, opt in for digital signatures. In order to hold those digital signatures accountable and legally binding, when we sign online, digital signing companies such as DocuSign would always request that we allow them to collect our system information, IP addresses, and timestamp of the various signing actions. The reason for that is that they are legally obligated to keep an audit log in case of potential legal disputes. This audit log is also considered a form of digital footprinting that is utilized to protect the involved parties. Therefore, just as with our conclusions in the previous discussions, the best way to protect ourselves is to know what is being collected and, when possible, reduce these information scouting tactics that we inadvertently agreed to by default.