Your personal information is purchased, sold, and exchanged by the websites you visit daily—as well as by plenty of data brokers you’ve never heard of before. Not surprisingly, a GetApp survey revealed that 91 percent of customers in the United States believe that advertisements know too much about them.
Unfortunately, it is nearly hard to erase personally identifiable information from internet-based databases and databases completely. You can take several steps to reduce your digital footprint and make it more difficult for others to profit from your personal data. This is especially true for companies that do not provide convenience in exchange for your data and instead harvest your data for targeted advertising purposes.
This article will discuss how to remove your personal information from the internet, so stay connected!
How to get your personal information off the internet
Following are the points in which we have discussed how to remove your personal information from the internet.
Increase the level of security on social media profiles
It is critical to use privacy settings on social media accounts to minimize your online data footprint. Social media networks change their privacy settings regularly and bury them deep inside their menus, making it impossible to preserve privacy on most platforms. This is because targeted advertising is the primary source of revenue for any social media network.
Therefore, it is in their best interests for your online account to be as open as possible, allowing for more interactions, which feeds algorithms and categorizes more of your preferences and behaviours into a marketing profile due to your online activity.
How do I remove my information from social media? It’s also not a bad idea to get into the practice of removing old social media postings as soon as they are no longer relevant. Undoubtedly, a terrible photograph taken five years ago or a series of photographs taken on a drunken night out might come back to haunt you. But, perhaps more crucially, social media postings tend to make temporary events permanent.
National Cyber Security Alliance provides a list of links to most key social media and device privacy settings, which you may access by visiting their website. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also provides a comprehensive guide on social media privacy.
Use VPN
Whats a VPN? VPN means the virtual private network that conceals your actual IP address, making it impossible for hackers to discover it. Consequently, if you’re surfing the internet while connected to a VPN, every website you visit will not be recording your actual IP address, making it impossible for hackers to discover your location. Basically, a VPN network meaning is to hide your online activity. If you are finding out the IP address, then visit the VeePNwebsite, and to protect your personal information, you can also see the plans that VeePNis offering.
Delete or deactivate any unused email addresses
How to get your address off the internet? There are various reasons to delete or remove old email addresses, such as those from Yahoo or AOL. Both services are currently under the control of Verizon. Please visit Verizon’s privacy settings page to manage your preferences and opt-out of email scanning if you want to maintain your Yahoo or AOL email address.
Although Google announced in 2017 that Gmail would no longer be scanned for targeted advertising, numerous other free email providers continue to do so.
Delete online accounts that are no longer in use or are inactive
It’s easy to lose track of old internet accounts that haven’t been used in years. A recent piece in The New York Times featured a lady who had posted images of her children to Flickr. This photo-sharing service has seen its popularity drop dramatically since its heyday in the early 2000s.
The lady had completely forgotten about the account. She was taken aback when she discovered that her images had been added to a big face recognition database without her knowledge or consent. It is not uncommon for data to be submitted by a user for one purpose and then utilized by a firm for another, which is extremely inconvenient.
Internet firms are constantly consolidating, implying that user data is often moved from one organization to another. Examples include Classmates.com (a social networking site), formerly one of the most popular websites on the internet 20 years ago. After being bought byIntelius, a prominent data broker specializing in background checks and people search websites. It is now in operation. “Classmates” purchased by Intelius gave a “unique collection of data about individuals, including their maiden name, school, and image.”
Can you delete yourself from the Internet? Deleting your account is not always simple. Many websites make the procedure more difficult by using dark patterns to trick you into keeping your account open or into believing that your account has been terminated or erased.
Delete all your personal information from Google.
Google is the most comprehensive data aggregator on the internet. To protect your personal information from Google, you should log into the search giant’s activity controls, which allow you to regulate site and app activity, YouTube history, as well as ad personalization.
How do I remove all my personal information from the Internet? Suppose you have deleted personal information from Google, but it continues to appear in cached Google search results. In that case, you may click here to request that the cache be cleared and the information be removed from the search engine’s indexing system. If you need to report abuse or otherwise delete personal information from Google for legal reasons, you may submit a removal request.
After reading this article, I am pretty sure that you have learned how to get your personal information off the internet. If you have further questions about it, comment down below.
