It may come as a surprise to tell you that your personal information is bought, sold, and shared by data brokers across the websites you visit every day. Several steps you can take to reduce your personal information online to make it difficult for others to take advantage of your personal data, such as those companies that simply collect information about you in order to target you with ads.
Why should personal information be removed from the Internet
There are many reasons why you should delete your personal information from the Internet so that it does not fall into the hands of fraudsters who are able to access your personal data such as your residential address, email address, phone number and your full name which often leads to unfortunate consequences. These people obtained any of your financial information. You may be at risk of financial fraud. You may say to yourself that you trust one of the companies or services and you can leave your information in their hands, but I want to say that dozens of famous companies have been exposed to many data leaks, and information theft. Now is the time to try to remove personal information, and preserve your privacy as much as possible when using social media applications and the Internet.
Ways to remove personal information from the Internet
There are several ways and techniques you can use to protect your privacy online, keeping your information and personal data out of the hands of advertisers, scammers, and strangers who want to harm you.
Remove personal information from Google
Google is the largest data-collecting company on the Internet for purely profit purposes, which is why you should devote a significant amount of time to removing your personal information from Google by accessing the Google Chrome browser activity controls where you will find all the activities you have done on the browser that Google uses from In order to target you with ads, if you remove personal information from Google and it still appears in cached Google search results, you can go to Request to clear the cache and permanently remove the information from the search engine, and if you need to report abuse, or remove personal information From Google for legal reasons, you can click Submit a removal request.
Tighter privacy on social media accounts
Seeing and adjusting the privacy settings on social media accounts is critical in order to reduce the tracking of your online data, as social media companies change these settings without notifying you, which makes it difficult to maintain your privacy on most platforms, and you should know that every communication platform They work on this with the goal of continuing to make money from targeted ads that often rely on your personal information, which is why it is in their best interest to keep your online account exposed to them as much as possible, giving them more information about you, and feeding their algorithms, so they know your preferences, And what you do to store it within their marketing files, after adjusting privacy periodically and making sure that you hide a lot of personal data, accustom yourself to deleting old publications, as they may contain information that you find normal, but the company finds it a rich advertising material, and fraudsters find information that may be attached your damage.
Clean up your online accounts
If you want to remove your personal information from the internet, you should delete the social media accounts that you do not use, and delete any other online accounts such as online stores that still keep your data even though you only purchased them once. This meaningless data may You are at risk of identity theft, unfortunately deleting these accounts is not always easy, as many websites make this process difficult, or pretend that you cannot delete the account permanently but only deactivate it, but whatever it is you should take a good time to get rid of the accounts Old.
Restrict phone settings and app permissions
Phone apps can leak data, and monitor your activities without your knowledge whether you use them or not, take some time to browse your phone and delete the apps you rarely use, for the apps you use take a look at the permissions and think whether they are appropriate or not, for example it makes sense that The food delivery app can access your location but it is not reasonable that it can access your phone’s microphone, moreover if you want to order food from the app you can easily turn the location tracking on and off after you finish using it, and you should also turn off bluetooth when you don’t need it as Google and other technology companies may be able to determine the location of your device even when location tracking is turned off as it is done via Bluetooth when you are near a location-tracking-enabled device.
Don't forget to limit smart devices' access to your information
Our lives are full of smart speakers, smart TVs and other smart devices that often invade your privacy without you even realizing, for example smart TVs use Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) to track what you watch to be targeted with ads, if that interests you Check your TV settings to restrict ACR. Even smart speakers suffer from poor privacy. An investigation by Security Research Labs revealed how easy they are to be hacked and used for eavesdropping. Plus, all the major smart speaker manufacturers have admitted that advertisers review recordings to pick up what they're always saying and benefit from From that, you can go into the privacy settings on Amazon Alexa, delete past recordings, and set an automatic clearing of future recordings, and you can do that on Google Home as well, except that Apple doesn't provide an option to delete Siri recordings but you can mute your smart speaker when not be in use.
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