Privacy

Scrub Your Data Off The Internet

Ever Google yourself and find your current (or old) address, phone number, email address and other stuff about yourself? It’s not only creepy, but also a goldmine for spam callers (“we’re calling about your cars extended warranty”), junk mailers, stalkers, online bullies, and more importantly identity thieves. There are multiple services that will help you in removing your personally identifiable information off the internet.

Abine DeleteMe has an extremely robust service that will hunt down any information you provide and request that the data broker deletes and suppresses any information related to you. They will also keep checking to make sure the data hasn’t been added back. Use this link for 20% off:
https://joindeleteme.com/refer?coupon=RFR-196506-7CZGVR

Incogni not quite as robust in their offerings, but a descent supplemental service at a lower price. Use this link for up to 50% off:
https://incogni.cello.so/MTVXne4J3dA

EasyOptOuts a simple service, they remove data from a lot of data broker websites. No discounts offered, but they are the cheapest pricing around. Great as a supplemental service to help double check the work of the other services.
https://easyoptouts.com/sign-up

Google Results About You is a quick and easy way to remove any results you find about yourself from Google. Once you set it up, just check back every month or so to see if Google found anything new about you and click remove. The only down-side is that you can still be found in other search engines like Bing or Yahoo.
THIS IS NOT AUTOMATIC LIKE THE OTHERS.
https://myactivity.google.com/results-about-you

Bing Report A Concern The most cumbersome way to remove yourself from Bing Search results, it works, but it’s definitely not a great solution.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/concern/bing

Stop Junk Mail

OptOutPrescreen Stop the junk mail being delivered to your house! The annoying “pre-approved” credit offers, and letters begging you to switch your home or auto insurance, are clogging up your mailbox, creating unnecessary waste, and then you have to pay to throw it away. You can stop the majority of those offers for free here:

https://www.optoutprescreen.com/selection

DMA Choice The Association of National Advertisers has a way to opt-out of physical marketing being sent to your house. They estimate this will reduce about 80% of the marketing mail that you receive. There is a small processing fee, but it’s money well spent to reduce junk mail.
https://www.dmachoice.org/static/consumer_choice_tools.php

The Not-So-Scary Dark Web

The dark web sounds scary, but it’s really just the same internet but accessed through other software or connecting to specific host computers.

While there isn’t much you can do to remove your data off of the dark web, it is worth knowing what is out there about you so you know how to protect yourself.

Google has a descent tool to help find data about you on the dark web. https://myactivity.google.com/dark-web-report/dashboard

This website will instantly tell you if your email address has been caught in a breach, and specifically which website your data leaked from so you can change your password or delete your account, but it won’t tell you what your password was or other data that leaked like Google’s tool does.
https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Sign up and let Google scan for your information, and it’ll tell you what they found. If it found your passwords for specific sites, you’ll definitely want change those immediately – see the Passwords page for more information.

If your social security number, home address, or phone number is found, you’ll want to lock down your Credit with the major bureaus. It’s also worth locking your profiles at other data brokers to prevent people from trying to open credit cards, start new cell phone plans, rent cars or apartments, and more. Check out the Credit page for a handy guide on what to Freeze and add annual Alerts to.

Even if nothing is found, you should definitely add another layer of protection to all your online accounts, especially your email account – it’s used for ALL password resets of other accounts, so if your email is compromised, it’s really easy to take over everything else. Check out the Multi Factor Authentication page for tools and products to help lock down your identity and protect your accounts.

Privacy Focused Browsing

How you access the internet matters. Browsers like Chrome are run by an advertisting company that makes money by collecting information about you and using it to target advertising to you. There are more privacy focused browsers like Mozilla’s Firefox (see Mozilla’s comparisons here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/compare/).

Mozilla also has a pretty solid write up on settings to adjust for better privacy: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-firefox-privacy-and-security-settings-families

Firefox also makes a private browsing option for your phone: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/mobile/focus/

This add-on provides even more granular control to protect your privacy, as well as protection from malware and phishing (scam) websites, and while Chrome dropped support for it, Firefox committed to supporting it.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/

Brave browser is built with a privacy-first focus. With built-in ad-blocking, third-party tracker protection, and bounce tracking prevention.

For desktop and mobile versions, download them here:
https://brave.com/

You can check out Brave’s browser comparison against other browsers here:
https://brave.com/compare/

Search In Secret

There are a number of privacy focused search engines, but be sure you read and understand their privacy policies because they are not all created equal.

Cyber Insider has a great write-up about a number of privacy focused search engines. https://cyberinsider.com/private-search-engine/