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Five Simple Privacy Tips for Instant Improvements
Although there is always personal information accumulating about you and your family online, there are a few easy ways you can make instant improvements to guard your privacy. Many people don’t even realize that they are partly responsible for at least some of the information that is found randomly online. It’s very fun and entertaining to post comments on message boards, or blogs, and to post things on Facebook pages, Instagram, and Twitter. What we don’t realize is that a lot of people are seeing this information. Data like social security numbers, salary amounts, and addresses get posted freely online and can be spotted, used, and sold by those looking to exploit this data. Suddenly, your info is appearing in places you never intended it to be. There are 2.9 billions accounts on Facebook alone. Think of the amount of people who may see a single post. To help you keep your private information truly private, we’ve researched some simple ways to help keep your data offline.
Here are five simple privacy tips to get you headed in the right direction:
- Set Your Social Media Accounts to Private – A good place to start is to set all of your social media accounts to “private.” This doesn’t protect you completely from data leaks, but it will help manage how much information is shared with strangers as opposed to friends, family, and people who request to follow you. By doing this you can vet who is requesting access to your social media data. Be wary of strangers who ask for access to your accounts. Check them out and make sure they’re legitimate and not ghost accounts used by marketing companies.
- Don’t Fill Out “Spammy” Forms – Data forms are everywhere. If you’ve ever entered a contest online, or sent information to a company like a car dealership or a retailer, then you’ve filled out a data form. Not all companies sell this information to third parties, but many of them do. The less information you provide online the better. If you shop online, you have a reasonable expectation that your personal information won’t be sold. However, many companies are getting hacked and this leaves customers’ data vulnerable to access.
- Check Out As a Guest – Whenever possible, when purchasing online, check out as “guest.” Doing this keeps your information such as address, telephone number, and credit card info from being saved in the retailer’s database. It’s a more anonymous way of shopping online.
- Stop Posting Sensitive Data – Don’t post private information on social media, comment boards or other people’s pages, even if you’re set to private on everything. That information can be shared and posted elsewhere because public boards are open to everyone. You can’t control what settings are in place on other people’s walls. If you post on a friend’s wall, even if you’re set to private, he or she might not be private, therefore, any data in your comment will be visible to anyone with an active account who wants to read that info.
- Consider Using an Internet Data Removal Service – Many people have been turning to companies who remove data that is hard to get offline. A good data privacy expert can keep your information off the internet. They will perform a deep search of the web for things like phone numbers, salary amounts, home addresses, and family relationships, and will have this information removed. They will continue to check for new postings so your data stays private. Make sure you hire a company with experience in search removal, like Wiperts.com.
Doing these five simple things will help shrink your internet footprint drastically. These are all habits that you should follow on a regular basis to keep data leaks down. Using a good data removal service can patch any info that does manage to get out there from other sources. Experts can remove most information from websites. Keeping up with these simple tips will help keep your info off the Web.
