As we already know, anytime you do anything on the internet: shop online, date online, or conduct friendships through social networks, we leave behind a large, and growing, amount of our personal data. Employers, marketers and even thieves are piecing together general mosaics of who we are. Spokeo.com gives a little glimpse of what these mosaics do with our personal information. Here, you can see estimates of your age, home value, marital status, home address/phone number, and sometimes even a photo of your house. There are other services just like this, too. And these services sometimes ask you to pay a mere $15 a month to see other information such as your hobbies/interests, financial information, etc. People who have this information, sometimes simply can just snoop on Facebook or such sites for information about your political views, health challenges, office tribulations, party mishaps, which could affect your chances of getting into a school or landing a good job. Many privacy experts fear that companies will use this data against users to maybe deny insurance coverage or to assign a higher interest rate on loans. But how do we fix this problem?
If you want to try to manage privacy, the first thing you should do is check major search engines such as Yahoo!, Bing and Google. This is where most people would first go to check you out. Run keyword searches on your name, address, phone number, and other data and see what turns up. But don't stop here. Look for online accounts you once opened but don't use anymore, especially on social networking sites or dating sites, where you would have provided extensive personal information. Not only could dig up information about you on these sites, but the site itself could change its privacy settings or be acquired by a different company with different policies. If you have issues with doing all of this yourself, there are programs and companies that will do it for you, but sometimes costing up to $99 a year for quarterly reports detailing the information found about you online. To some, this would be extremely beneficial.
The hardest part is masking the information. Sometimes you are able to get into these accounts and just delete it yourself, but this could be very time consuming. So, begin by removing extreme personal information such as your full date of birth or home address, and then delete continue by deleting or deactivating social networking accounts that you no longer use. If someone else posted information about you, you would have to go to them. Getting a friend to delete a photo of you would be easy. But getting an online publisher or data broker (a company that buys data from other companies and sells it to companies that collect it) to remove content, can be tricky. Many data brokers will let you opt out of their databases, but you would need to contact each one individually. This usually requires waiting a set amount of time, and it is not always guaranteed to be down forever. Usually, after doing this, your information should be out of search engines within a week, though.
All of this seems like one big headache, but it is a little price to pay, when so many people have had their identity stolen. Getting your identity stolen is even more frustrating, and for some people, it ruins their lives. It seems to be a small portion of the headache that that would end up causing. Most people aren't aware of the information that is out on the Web about you, so if you aren't sure of what is public currently, you should check it out. I had searched my parents information on Spokeo.com, and it is amazing how much of their information is now out on the Web on this one site. Some of it wasn't true, but it was weird how much of the little details that they had up there that was true. It becomes somewhat scary, too. So if you aren't aware of what is going on with your information that you are letting sit on the Web, get it removed as soon as you can.
Article Name: How to Fix (Or Kill) Web Data About You
by Riva Richmond
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/technology/personaltech/14basics.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=technology
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