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How Having Your Personal Information Online Can Hurt You
If you are weighing the pros and cons of removing your personal information from the internet, you may be wondering how it can hurt you if you don’t take it offline. There are thousands of people that have their information online, so it can’t be that bad to have it available online, can it? In this article, we are going to talk more about how having your personal information online can hurt you and what to do about it.
1.) Identity Theft
When you have your personal information online, you may get targeted for identity theft. If someone is able to get his or her hands on your personal information, he or she can take the information he or she finds and get into your private accounts. Often, information like mother’s maiden name, birthday, the school you went to, hometown, current city, and other information is compiled online in different places. This information is often used to get into accounts after losing a password. If someone can get into your accounts, they can make purchases and send messages through your accounts.
Identity theft can take a long time to resolve, so the best course of action is to keep your information safe by removing it from the internet.
2.) Lack of Privacy
When your information is online, you never know who is looking at it. Whether it is your sensitive information, photos from social media or other things that you posted online, people that you don’t want to see these things can look at them as much as they want. Some people are very good at searching the internet and know how to do “deep dives” for information so even though a surface search might not show anything embarrassing or sensitive about you, there could be information that you want to keep private deeper in the search engines.
3.) Excessive Telemarketing
When your phone number and other information is online, you are likely to get a lot of different phone calls from telemarketers. Many of these offers are interestingly relevant since these people often have demographic information about you which makes it easy for them to market to you. Even if you block the numbers that call you repeatedly, these telemarketers can drive you crazy with the number of phone calls they put you through in a given day.
How You Can Minimize Your Online Footprint
If you are tired of living in fear that your identity is going to be stolen or that something else is going to happen because your personal information is online, it is time to work on minimizing your online footprint.
While it is impossible to ensure that all of your information is no longer on the internet, you can take as much of it off the internet as possible. This process can be lengthy, so if you don’t want to do the work yourself, you can contact us so we can help you remove your personal information from the internet.
Deleting Yourself from the Internet
You can start at the obvious places and delete your information from social media websites. Most people have an account on at least one of the main social media websites like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Besides for the main social media websites, you want to make sure that you don’t have any information on older sites that you may have forgotten about. You might have made an account on a smaller social media site and forgotten about it, but even so, these sites can share your information just as much as the bigger websites.
Another place to make sure your information is taken down from eCommerce websites. If you’ve ever shopped on Amazon, Walmart or any other online site, you most likely have an account with them. Since you have an account with them, that means that your information may be online and available to everyone to view. These sites may have a clause in their terms of service or privacy policy that allows them to sell or give your information to another websites or affiliates.
Internet Forums
If you’ve ever had an account on an internet forum, you may have posted content that you are no longer proud of. If people search for your name, they may find this content online. If you go to the forum site and you aren’t able to delete your information or the post, you can contact the forum owner and see if they will take the information down, but if the site is privately owned, they are not required to take anything off their website.
Ask Google to Delete It
Have you seen information that you do not want online in Google search? There is a tool on Google that will allow you to request search results to be removed. While this process is not ensured and you may not be successful in getting your information deleted, it is worth a try.
Remove Your Information from Data Broker Sites
Websites like PeopleFinders and Whitepages make money by selling your information. If you go on these sites and you find your information, you can go and request that it is taken down, but many of them have difficult processes to get it taken down. There are some sites that require you to send in a written request and ask for the information to be taken down.
Conclusion
If you are serious about getting your information taken off the internet, it can take you hours upon hours to start removing the information. Instead of having to take care of everything by yourself, contact us so we can help you with the process. You don’t have to remove your personal information on your own. We can help you minimize your online footprint, so you are difficult or nearly impossible to find.
When you are ready to take your information off the internet, we know how to get it done quickly without any work on your part. Just put us to work, and we will remove your personal information from the internet.
