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Here’s one way you can help reduce your chances of identity theft: remove your personal information from the internet.
And chances are, you have more personal information posted online than you think.
According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), consumers registered 1.4 million identity theft complaints in 2021, all part of a year where consumers reported losing $5.8 billion to fraud overall—a 70% increase over the year prior.
What fuels all this theft and fraud? Access to personal information.
Scammers and thieves can get a hold of personal information in several ways, such as through phishing attacks that lure you into handing it over, malware that steals it from your devices, by purchasing your information on dark web marketplaces, or as a result of information leaked in data breaches, just to name a few.
However, scammers and thieves have other resources to help them commit theft and fraud—data broker sites, places where personal information is posted online for practically anyone to see. Which makes removing your info from them so important, from both an identity and privacy standpoint.
Think of data broker sites as huge repositories of personal information. Search your name and address online and you’ll see. You’ll likely find dozens of sites that turn up information about you, some of which offer a few pieces for free and others that offer far more information for a price.
Data brokers collect and then aggregate personal information from several sources, including:
Data brokers also buy personal information from other data brokers. As a result, some data brokers have thousands of pieces of data for billions of individuals worldwide.
What could that look like? A broker may know how much you paid for your home, your education level, where you’ve lived over the years and who your lived with, your driving record, and possibly your political leanings. A broker may also know your favorite flavor of ice cream and your preferred over-the-counter allergy medicine thanks to information from loyalty cards. Further, they may also have health-related information from fitness apps. The amount of personal information can run that broadly, and that deeply.
With information at this potential level of detail, it’s no wonder that data brokers rake in an estimated at $200 billion U.S. dollars worldwide every year.
On the legitimate side, it’s used by advertisers to create targeted ad campaigns. With information sold by data brokers, they can generate lists based on highly specific criteria, such as shopping histories, personal interests, and even political leanings as mentioned above. Likely without you being aware of it—and likely with no way to contest that information if it’s incorrect.
Other legitimate uses include using these sites for background checks. Law enforcement, reporters, and employers will use data brokers as a starting point for research because the leg work has largely been done for them. Namely, data brokers have aggregated a person’s information already, which is an otherwise time-consuming process.
If this seems a little shady, it’s still legal. As of now, the U.S. has no federal laws that regulate data brokers or require data them to remove personal information if requested. A few states, such as Nevada, Vermont, and California, have legislation in place aimed at protecting consumers. Meanwhile, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union has stricter rules about what information can be collected and what can be done with it. Still, the data broker economy thrives.
On the darker side, scammers and thieves use personal information for identity theft and fraud. With enough personal information gathered from enough sources, they can create a high-fidelity profile of their victims. One that gives them enough information to open new accounts in their name.
So, from the standpoint of both privacy and identity, cleaning up your personal information online makes a great deal of sense.
Let’s review some ways you can remove your personal information from data brokers and other sources on the internet.
The process starts with finding the sites that have your information. From there, you can request to have it removed. Yet as mentioned above, there are dozens and dozens of these sites. Knowing where to start is a challenge in of itself, as is manually making the requests once you have identified the sites that post and sell information about you.
Our Personal Data Cleanup can do the work for you. Personal Data Cleanup scans some of the riskiest data broker sites and shows you which ones are selling your personal info. It also provides guidance on how you can remove your data from those sites and can even manage the removal for you depending on your plan. It also monitors those sites, so if your info gets posted again, you can request its removal again.
As of September 2022, Google accounts for just over 92% of search engine market share worldwide. Aside from being a search engine, Google offers a myriad of other services and applications, such as Gmail and Google Maps. While Google offers plenty of tools for productivity, travel, work, and play for free, they still come at a cost—the gathering and analysis of your personal information.
You can limit the data Google associates with you by removing your name from Google search results with a removal request. This will disable anyone online from getting any results if they search your name. (Note that this will not remove your information from the original sites and sources where it’s posted.) Moreover, Google collects all your browsing data continuously. You have the option to turn on “Auto Delete” in your privacy settings to ensure that the data is deleted regularly and help limit the amount of time your sensitive data stays vulnerable.
You can also occasionally delete your cookies or use your browser in incognito mode to prevent websites from being tracked back to you. Go to your Google Chrome settings to clear your browser and cookie history.
As discussed above, data brokers can collect information from public social media profiles. You can minimize your presence on social media to the bare minimum. Make a list of the ones you use or have used in the past. If there are old accounts that you no longer use or websites that have gone by the wayside like Myspace or Tumblr, you may want to deactivate them or consider deleting them entirely.
For social media platforms that you still may use regularly, like Facebook and Instagram, consider adjusting your privacy settings to ensure that your personal information on these social media platforms is the bare minimum. For example, on Facebook you can lock your profile, while on Instagram you can stay private.
If you’ve ever published articles, written blogs, or created any content online, it might be a good time to consider taking it down if it is no longer serving a purpose. Depending on what you’ve posted, you may have shared personal details about your life. Additionally, you might be mentioned by other people in various social media posts, articles, or blogs. It is worth reaching out to these people to request them to take down posts with sensitive information.
Social media and online articles that host your personal information are often used when businesses or hackers are doing “internet scrapes” to find better ways to use your targeted information. Asking your friends or third-party sites to remove that information can help protect your privacy.
Another way you can tidy up your digital footprint online involves deleting all the unnecessary phone apps that you no longer need or use. Even when apps are not open or in use, they may be able to track personal information such as your real-time location and even your payment details if you have a paid subscription to the app.
Some apps even sell this data as it can be extremely advantageous to other companies, which they use to target certain consumer segments and profiles for advertising. Try to share as little information with apps as possible if you’re looking to minimize your online footprint, and provide them access to your photos, contacts, and location only on as-needed basis and only when the app is in use. Your phone’s app and location services settings will give you the tools to do it.
In addition to the steps above, comprehensive online protection software can keep you more private and minimize your risk of cybercrime. It can include:
So while it may seem like all this rampant collecting and selling of personal information is out of your hands, there’s plenty you can do to take control. With the steps outlined above and strong online protection software at your back, you can keep your personal information more private and secure.
The post 5 Steps to Removing Your Personal Information From the Internet appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Picture an infant with a credit card.
In her name. With a $10,000 limit.
Well, it happens. As recent as 2017, it was estimated that more than 1 million children in the U.S. were victims of identity theft. Of them, two-thirds were under the age of seven, and the total losses connected to all this fraud weighed in $2.6 billion dollars.
As I mentioned in part one of our article on the connected lives of babies, babies can make their first digital footprints before they’re even born. What’s more, the moment a child enters this world along with a unique ID like a Social Security Number, they become a tempting target for cybercriminals. The reason is this: babies and very young children are effectively a blank slate, upon which crooks can write their own illicit history of fraud. And it can be years before you or your child find out, long after the damage to their credit has been done.
So, let’s pick up where we left off in part one by taking a close look baby’s privacy and how you can protect it.
There’s rightfully a great deal of conversation out there about the things we can do to protect our identity from theft. What’s talked about less often is protecting children from identity theft. In fact, little ones are high-value targets for cybercriminals is because we typically don’t run credit reports on children. In this way, a crook with the Social Security Number of a child in the U.S. can open all manner of credit and accounts and go undetected for years until that child attempts to rent an apartment or open his or her first credit card.
To protect your family from this kind of identity theft, the major credit reporting agencies suggest the following:
I. Check your child’s credit regularly. If your child indeed has a credit report against their name, there’s a strong chance that their identity has been stolen. You can work directly with the credit reporting agency to begin resolving the issue. If there is theft, file a report with the appropriate law enforcement agency. You’ll want a record of this as you dispute any false records.
II. Freeze your child’s credit. A freeze will prevent access to your child’s report and thus prevent any illicit activity. In the U.S., you’ll need to create a separate freeze with each of the three major credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion). It’s free to do so, yet you’ll have to do a little legwork to prove that you’re indeed the child’s parent or guardian.
III. Secure your documents and keep personal info close to the vest. Along with things like a passport, insurance cards, and birth certificates, store these items in a safe location when you’re not actively using them. That goes extra for Social Security cards. Likewise, doctor’s offices often ask patients for their Social Security Number, which typically helps with their billing. See if they can accept an alternative form of ID, use just the last four digits, or simply forgo it altogether.
Getting your kiddo a website is probably low on your list of priorities, yet it’s a sound move to consider. Here’s why: it carves out a piece of digital real estate that’s theirs and theirs alone.
Whether you opt for a dot-com or one of several hundred other extensions like .net, .us, and .me, a personal URL gives you and your child ownership of yet another piece of their digital identity. No one else can own it as long as you’re paying the fee to maintain it. Think of it as an investment. Down the road, it could be used for a personal email address, a professional portfolio site someday, or just a side project in web design. With internet URLs being a finite resource, it’s wise to see if spending a relatively small fee each a year is worth securing this piece of your child’s identity.
We all have one—that picture from our childhood that we absolutely dread because it’s embarrassing as all get-out. Now contrast that with today’s digital age, where an estimated 95 million photos are posted each day on Instagram alone. We’re chronicling our lives, our friends’ lives, and the lives of our families at an incredible rate—almost without thinking about it. And that opens a host of issues about privacy and just how much we share. Enter the notion of “sharenting,” a form of oversharing that can trample your child’s right to privacy.
For babies, we have to remember that they’re little people who, one day, before you know it, will grow up. How will some of those photos that seemed cute in the moment hold up when baby gets older? Will those photos that you posted prove embarrassing some day? Could they be used to harm their reputation or damage their sense of privacy and trust in you?
With that, let’s remember a couple things when it comes to sharing photos of our children:
• The internet is forever. Work on this basic assumption: once you post it, it’s online for good.
• Babies have a right to privacy too. It’s your job to protect it while they can’t.
So, before you post, run through that one-two mental checklist.
Sharenting can also lead to identity theft. In 2018, Barclay’s financial services estimated that oversharing by parents on social media will amount to more than 7 million cases of identity theft a year by 2030—just shy of a billion dollars U.S. worth of damage. This includes all the tips and cues that crooks can glean from social media posts and geographic metadata that’s captured in photographic files. Things like birthdays, pet names, names of schools, favorite teams, maiden names, and so forth are all fodder for password hacks and targeted phishing attacks. The advice here is to keep your digital lives close to the vest:
I. Set all social media accounts to private. Nothing posted on the internet is 100% private. Even when you post to “friends only,” your content can still get copied and re-shared.
II. This way, the general public can’t see what you’re posting. However, keep in mind that nothing you ever post online is 100% private. Someone who has access to your page could just as easily grab a screenshot of your post and then continue to share it that way.
III. Go into your phone’s settings and disable location information for photos. Specifics will depend on the brand of your phone, but you should have an option via the phone’s “location services” settings or within the camera app itself. Doing so will prevent the geographic location, time, date, and even device type from appearing in the metadata of your photos.
IV. Above all, think twice about posting in the first place. “Do I really need to share this?” is the right question to ask, particularly if it can damage your child’s privacy or be used by a scammer in some form, whether today or down the road.
Like new parents don’t have enough to think about already! However, thinking about these things now at the earliest stages will get you and your growing family off on a strong and secure start, one that you can build on for years to come—right up to the day when they ask for their first smartphone. But you have a while before that conversation crops up, so enjoy!
To stay updated on all things McAfee and for more resources on staying secure from home, follow @McAfee_Home on Twitter, listen to our podcast Hackable?, and ‘Like’ us on Facebook.
The post The Connected Lives of Babies: Protecting First Footprints in the Digital World, Part Two appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
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