Our increasingly digital lives have meant that the outside world knows more about us than we would like. It is not just about our individual preference for privacy, this exposes us to real risk of impersonations and online fraud. In this piece, the author, a journalist at The Economist shares her experience of trying to get rid of her personal information from the internet. She concludes it isn’t just a tedious affair, it is virtually impossible.
“As a reporter I know how easy it is to find stuff out about people online. The other day I was researching a piece about the newly appointed chief executive of a Nasdaq-listed company. I messaged the people who had written endorsements on his LinkedIn page to ask what sort of manager he was. Public profiles on Venmo, a peer-to-peer payments app, are a goldmine. When they’re transferring money to a friend, people often add a message or a string of emojis. By deciphering a man’s transaction history, I found out whom he was living with, holidaying with, going out for meals with and even buying drugs from (it was either that or an eclectic order of medication, sweets and diamonds).”
The journalist is based in the UK which has strict data privacy laws (unlike here in India) where websites are obliged to take down any personal information upon the user request.
“In practice, getting information taken down is not easy. As an experiment, I chose a random webpage with my name on it – an article I wrote as a student for a newspaper in Florence, Italy – and filled in a form asking Google to remove it from searches. I acknowledged that the article wasn’t lewd or violent, but it included a few personal details about where I went to university and what I studied. Three days later my request was approved, but there was a catch. Google could delist the link only from searches in Britain and Europe. To get the article wiped completely I would need to contact the website itself.”
It is not just the impracticality of reaching out to several websites who store our information, as the author realised, the proliferation of data brokers makes us even more vulnerable to our personal information ending up in the wrong hands:
“These businesses buy data from apps and websites, organise it into databases, then sell it on. They scoop up data that people share without even realising it. Shavell told me to stop and think before I allow an app to track my location (free apps should ring alarm bells – they have to make money somehow).
It is possible to get data brokers to delete information. But I would have to contact them individually. By Shavell’s estimations, it would take roughly 100 hours to cover every major broker. And it wouldn’t be a one-off task. These firms refresh their databases every few months. Of course, DeleteMe could take care of it. But the company charges $129 per year, which is more than I could expect my editor to approve in expenses.
Having scaled down my ambition to remove every trace of me from the internet, I set aside an hour to take some basic precautions. On LinkedIn I opted out of personalised ads. On Facebook and Instagram I deleted the most cringeworthy posts. I wiped my search history on any platform that would let me. I set up two-factor authentication, so anyone trying to get into my accounts would require two separate credentials.
…My advice to other people who are worried about their digital footprint? Unless you’re a spy, a crook or incredibly sensitive, please google yourself, check your privacy settings and delete social-media posts that make you shudder.”
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