My last post was how big data companies use your personal data to enrich themselves.  Your information is their digital inventory.  Your details are also used to cross promote other services they offer, some of them on different websites all together and owned by different companies. 

For example, you may be looking up John Doe, but you’ll also see ads for other people who may be related to or associates of John Doe.  It’s unnerving when you think about it. 

Living in the modern world means you are constantly leaving a trail of data, and it’s important to maintain absolute control of your digital footprint. Big tech companies are constantly trying to make you beholden to their ecosystems, and if they decide they don’t like you anymore, you can lose all your data with little or no recourse.  However, they will have zero problems selling what they know about you to the highest bidder.

Recently, I decided it was time to actively scrub my information from the internet.  I signed up to get notifications from Google whenever my personal information shows up in search results.  They send me an email with the websites my name is appearing, then I request them to remove items that fall within their policies. It works—I continually get notifications and successfully had my information scrubbed from a site called nuwber.com among others.  Keep in mind, this prevents nuwber.com from appearing in the search engines for my name, but it doesn’t mean they have removed my name from their database, this is a separate process.

To start the Google process,  search for “Results about you Google” and it will show you the exact URL to get the process started. It will be tied to your Google Activity.

After you start removing the results from Google you can go directly to the websites and have them delete your info. A few of the big ones are: Spokeo.com, Whitepages.com, and Beenverified.com.

There are also dedicated website services that will automatically remove your information from over 200 different data brokers. When I looked at the screenshots of what these brokers were hoarding, it was ridiculous. Whitepages.com had a couple of addresses listed for me in Hurricane and Milton that I am not even familiar with. It just proves how much garbage data gets associated with your name, and why you need to clean it up.

A couple good and reputable places that will manage the removal of your information from these data warehouses are DeleteMe.com and Incogni.com.

But scrubbing your data is only half the battle; the other half is true data ownership. I’ve been researching how to strip DRM from media and free my emails, documents, pictures, and ebooks from platforms like Amazon, Google, and Facebook. I refuse to leave my life’s work at the mercy of third-party hosting companies who could cancel an account without warning, leaving your data  in digital limbo.. This is precisely why it’s important to back up everything on an external, offline drive.

Ultimately, my goal is to achieve what is known as Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI). In essence, a person who has an SSI has sole ownership of their digital and analog identities and completely controls how their data is viewed or shared.

Put the ball in your own court by freeing your digital assets and scrubbing the rest. It is the only way to ensure that nobody has access to your life unless you explicitly allow it.