Activity Spotlight

Making Your Personal Data Private

Following a recent, very weird SMS interaction with a scammer, I set out to see how much of my personal information was available on the Internet, and as it turns out, there’s a lot! Learning this, I decided it was time to try and take back some of my personal privacy. In this session I’m going to provide an overview of a paid service, DeleteMe, which I used to (mostly) automatically remove my data from the many data brokers that legally buy and sell people’s personal information. I’m also going to cover manual methods, which are free, for searching for and removing information from these brokers. After this, I’m going to talk about what I’ve been doing going forward to make it harder for data brokers, hackers, and data leak buyers to correlate my information together. This includes using Duck Duck Go’s email address masking service, Google Voice call forwarding, as well as using privacy.com to generate digital one-time-use and merchant-locked debit cards. One of the largest sources of information for data brokers are cookies and ad-trackers. Knowing this, there are several things people can do to reduce their effectiveness including running Pi-Hole on their home networks, and running browsers extensions such as Duck Duck Go which will strip out unnecessary cookies and trackers, or Ad-Nauseum, which feeds garbage data to data brokers. Unfortunately, it is impossible to completely remove your digital footprint once it’s out there, but through the techniques covered in this session, you’ll be able to greatly reduce your online presence which can result in less spam, and more importantly, greater security.