In these modern days of social media more and more people use different applications and sites in order to connect with old friends or with long distance relatives. While these simplify the means of communication and keeping a connection it makes us question our privacy and just how much data we are making accessible to the public. Once you entered the online world you can expect to lose some of your data’s confidentiality and depending on how you use these websites, you might give away information without even intending to. Most if not all websites use cookies nowadays. Simply put, cookies are pieces of data websites store on your hard disk. Each website has its own cookies storage and some might even access each other cookies. These pieces of data are a collection of information about everything you do on the website you access including the links you click and the things you search on that particular website, if that website has a search feature. If websites were to collect this data on their own servers and not on every individual’s machine, they would need endless storage.
This does not mean that the cookies use a lot of space on your machine or harm it.
But imagine all the millions of people accessing the same website. All that information adds up and the costs for server storage and maintenance would be too high to afford and fortunately, most low-end websites use this cookie feature alone. What is good about this is that since the information is stored on your device, you have the ability of deleting it and most of the time this is very easy as most browsers have settings for privacy and cookies and you can even see what sites stored cookies and other data as well as manage this data, see how much space it takes on your computer and erase it if you want. You can even set the option of not keeping cookies making the browser delete all the data and history on each exit of the application but sometimes that also clears log in information which means you will have to log into the websites you use every day, every time you open the browser. Cookies might seem like good news since you have the control over them but, they also come with not so good news. Websites like Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook related websites dig through these cookies.
The big sites then build a marketing profile of you and share it between each other.
This profile contains all the links and searches you click on and they use this information in order to build your marketing profile based on your interests. It is not necessarily a bad thing, as they use this information to easily provide you with relevant ads since that is how they make most of their money. Their goal is to get you to buy things that they suggest thus they do their best to collect data and make that marketing profile as accurate as they can. There is not much you can do about that and this information that is being collected should not raise any concerns to you since the purpose of its collection is to serve you better. Regular people cannot access or see your online marketing profile, it does not even have a name, it is just random user ids sometimes associated with your social media accounts and if you do not use any social media, it is associated with your device’s id.
Your concerns about your privacy should be what normal people can find about you.
First, you should try for yourself to see what you can find and that entails Googling yourself. That is the easiest way to see what others can see and what you should get rid of. You can even request Google to delete information about you once you find it, but their condition is that you have to remove it yourself first by deleting your social media and other sites similar to that and thus Google prefers to delete only information that does not exist anymore or is outdated or irrelevant. Erasing yourself from the internet might seem nearly impossible and it might make you ask yourself about how this is achieved. Should you delete all your social media accounts, or should you just delete all the data you shared on them? If you choose to keep social media profiles, even if they are emptied out, they are still accessible to the public. This public information is often collected by websites who, unlike Facebook and its associates that build a marketing profile, these websites build an actual public personal profile, information like address, age, full name, phone number and sometimes even family connections and propriety history or even criminal records can all be added to one complete profile that is accessible by anyone who looks you up. It is easy to share data, or have it collected but much harder to remove it. How to remove public records from the Internet can be a difficult process. The access to your personal information by anyone who knows how and where to look it up is a problem that should be taken a lot more seriously.
Private data broker data collections are nothing compared with what social media sites collect.
Even if someone were able to access your “marketing profile” on social media, all they could find would be just things that you like and what you are most interested in. Whoever has access to your public profile for brokered lists or scamming, however, can do dreadful things, such as identity theft and it is easier to be stalked or harassed online and even in real life, if they have access to this information which can say where you work and even where you live. The manual way of removing your data is contacting every website and institution websites that made your data available to the public and have them remove it or make it accessible only to themselves. That can take quite a bit of work and stress in order to be achieved, but there is an easy and automatic way of doing it. Onerep has an easy- to- use public records removal platform that is a critical step in removing yourself from the Internet. This is a first step, knowing where your information exists, and that should be followed by deletion of cookies, browsing history and keeping security settings updated on your devices. Not sharing information with anyone who asks is also a priority and avoiding social media sharing another. Removal of all information is never possible, but assistance in removal is possible through Onerep. The other methods listed above should also be employed.
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