Three fallacies of digital footprints

“Digital footprints” is an attractive, useful, and increasingly popular metaphor for thinking about Big Data. In this essay, I elaborate on this metaphor to highlight three relatively basic fallacies in the way we tend to think about Big Data: first, that they contain information on complete populations, or “ N = all”; second, that they contain recordings of naturalistic behavior; and third, that they can be understood devoid of context.