Table of Contents
1. Get Rid Of Your Social Media Accounts
Unfortunately, there is no way you can protect your online identity if you are on various social media sites. Because of this, it’s time to commit social media suicide. You need to get rid of all of your profiles if you truly want to protect your identity. Do whatever you need to do to get rid of them.
2. Stop Data Miners
Pretty much everyone is well aware of do not call lists. There is a company called Abine that has great software that is free to use. This software will give you information on which companies are tracking you online. They will block them from mining any data off your computer. While this may not help the information that’s already circulating, it’s going to help further data from leaking.
3. Use a Removal Service
If you are looking to remove the data that exists on the Internet, you’ll want to look at Abine’s other service that’s known as DeleteMe. This is a paid service but it’s very much worth using. It costs $99 per year and it will delete all of the information that companies have about you. It does come with a few caveats. For one, it’s only going to delete the information from the aggregator sites that they have the power to do so with. Thus, it’s not going to help you get everything deleted on the Internet. Likewise, you will need to tell them what you want deleted. Therefore, you can’t go ahead and say you want all of your addresses deleted. You’ll need to specify which addresses you want to get rid of. The good news, they will continue to go back and delete any information if it comes back up every year as long as you still have the subscription.
4. Hide Your Address
You’ll want to hide your IP address. Luckily, there are plenty of different programs you can use to do this. You can use Virtual World Computing’s Cocoon service that will only reveal you as a generic user. This can keep you from being tracked as an individual on the Internet. They won’t be able to track you because you’ll be mixed in with all of the other Cocoon users. This is especially good when you frequently use shared computers or public WiFi hotspots. Find proxy servers at u1337x.org. It can encrypt your traffic to ensure you aren’t being snooped on while using the unsecured networks.
5. Don’t Click Agree To TOS Without Reading
One thing you need to get out of the habit of doing is agreeing to various Terms of Service agreements without reading them. The Internet is full of ToS agreements and a lot of them tell you that they will be using and selling your data. Unfortunately, most of us click “I Agree” without knowing this is what we are agreeing to. If you read the terms, likely, you wouldn’t be consenting to it.
