Abine

It might come as a surprise what sites or apps act as data broker sites, collecting and selling your personal information—often without your direct knowledge. Knowing how to remove personal information from Google can help, as can being proactive and not providing more information than necessary.  Credit Bureaus Credit bureaus, as a matter of course, collect information to provide a credit score. They sell this information in two significant ways: borrower history and pre-approval marketing. The first sees credit bureaus selling your transaction information, with a history of your debt payments. If you missed a car payment one month, it’s in your file. Lenders pay more for these reports, as it helps them decide whether to offer you, for example, a mortgage loan. The credit bureaus include analytics on your payment history, so buyers can see how you interact with your various debts. The second way that credit bureaus sell your information is in pre-approval l...

Protecting your children’s information online can be a challenge. They may not understand how sensitive data is, freely offering information such as their name, age, or address to strangers without a second thought. Knowing how to remove personal information from Google helps, and there are steps you can take to prevent your child’s information from spreading online.     Opt Out of Data Broker Sites Your first order of business is opting out of data broker sites to remove any information about your children that is already online. Opting out with individual data broker sites means information removal from Whitepages , MyLife, Spokeo, and more. Data broker sites buy and sell information from names to family members, from addresses to phone numbers. By opting out, they are not allowed to do this, and the information is removed. You can find guides online to do this manually or hire a service like DeleteMe to do the time-consuming work for you. Federal regul...

It’s no secret that there’s a vast, ambitious, creative, and cunning collection of cybercriminals, hackers, thieves, and scammers who seem to haunt those on the internet. Many are looking for weaknesses to exploit and opportunities to steal peoples’ information and money. Thankfully, there are many steps people can take to avoid cybercriminals and protect themselves against scams. One step is to keep your information secure and private, including learning how to remove personal information from Google searches. Unfortunately, there’s an insidious collection of scams and cons that prey on otherwise shrewd and cautious internet users in the most devious and cynical way—by appealing to their decency. The following describes a few of these scams and how to avoid falling victim to a costly scam for trying to do the right thing. Sick Baby, Sick Pet, and Troubled Vet Hoaxes The “sick baby” and “sick pet” hoaxes are far older than the internet but first spread online via...

Identity theft can have broad and far-reaching implications on your personal, financial, and professional life—immediate ramifications and longer-term consequences. It’s an incredibly distressing, disruptive, invasive, and often destructive event that no one should have to deal with. For those unfamiliar with the nightmare of identity theft, the following describes some of the ways in which it can continue to disrupt and even sabotage a victim’s life well after the event itself. The good news is that there are tools and strategies you can use to increase your privacy and remove personal information from Google that could otherwise be used by identity thieves. The Money Lost and Credit Consequences No doubt the most common, well-known, and immediately detrimental consequence of having your identity stolen is the financial cost. Identity thieves have a number of underhanded strategies they use to steal from you, including: ● Accessing and emptying checking and savi...

Have you spent any time at all on social media sites, in chat rooms, comment threads, discussion sites, or anywhere else that people congregate online? If so, there’s a good chance you’ve been subjected to some degree of online harassment, shaming, or cyberbullying.  Thankfully, there are steps you can take to, at the very least, minimize the amount of shaming or cyberbullying you have to deal with on the internet. That can range from modifying online web-surfing habits to taking proactive steps like learning how to remove personal information from Google searches. Don’t Feed the Trolls It’s an internet cliché but one of the more accurate, insightful, and important ones: Don’t feed the trolls. If you encounter a bully online who takes a specific interest in you, the worst thing you can do is engage, however tempting it may be or frustrating the bully is. Keep in mind that trolls are, virtually inevitably, angry and insecure people who glean satisfaction fro...

Cybercrime is proving an increasingly costly drain on the global economy. Research indicates that cyber attacks could cost companies globally about $5.2 trillion over the next five years—that’s more than a trillion dollars a year. Unfortunately, when there’s that much money at stake, there’s going to be a criminal population that’s both enthusiastic and innovative about fighting for a piece of those funds. The result of that criminal innovation is a whole selection of strategies for fleecing the unsuspecting of their money or information that can parlayed into money, just a few of which are featured here. Thankfully, there are strategies, like learning how to remove personal information from Google , that anyone can leverage to protect themselves against cyber predators. Password Attacks Password attacks are one of the oldest and least sophisticated, but still often effective, form of hacking and cyber-theft. The attacks are often perpetrated in two ways: targeted a...

Most of us are somewhat familiar with common email scams and have likely received fairly questionable messages asking for our personal details. A princess needs just a little bit of your money to pay the banking fees that release her fortune, much of which will go to you for your trouble and your altruism. A lawyer (struggling with spelling and syntax) is pleased to inform you that a relative you were unaware of has died, leaving all of their wealth to you! The attorney just needs your banking information to successfully transfer the funds to you account. The list of examples goes on.  Maybe you got an email from a bank you don’t have an account with, or a service you don’t subscribe to requesting that you click a link to learn more. Clumsy phishing scams like this are familiar enough to become a cliché, if not a joke. But being too confident when it comes to identifying scams can be a bad thing, leading many to lower their guard, assuming that internet scams ...

The issue of internet privacy and security is increasingly shifting from a fingers-crossed “it won’t happen to me” dynamic to one in which virtually everyone has either had their identity stolen, their information exposed in a massive hack, or knows someone who has. In light of this, people are getting better about not having predictable passwords and being sure only to give payment information to secure sites and the like. Unfortunately, there are a number of ways in which internet use can leave anyone vulnerable to hacks and information exposure. Do you have a social media account that you use or, perhaps more importantly, that you don’t? Do you know how to remove personal information from Google ? How familiar are you with your workplace’s privacy policy? Getting the answers and solutions to these questions (at least) could save you a whole lot of grief. Online Profiles You’ve Stopped Using There’s no other entity that inspires billions of people to willingly ...

The internet is a massive marketplace of products, services, and ideas. Unfortunately, the sheer mass of all three on the internet means that inevitably, some of them are going to be regrettable. The problem for consumers is distinguishing between the products, services, and ideas that are useful and trustworthy, and those that aren’t. The problem for businesses is assuring those customers that their product or service is trustworthy, dependable, and high-quality when there are so many out there that aren’t. A surprisingly high percentage of businesses respond to that problem with misconceptions. Those include disregarding the issue as meaningless, as random opinions on the internet are to be taken with a grain of salt; deciding that the internet is so vast, there’s nothing to be done about it; and the belief that responding is useless because who can tell a quality organization’s legitimate responses from a disreputable one’s dishonest excuses? The fact is, online r...

It’s no surprise that purchases are tracked, which can legitimately provide relevant product or service suggestions based on your past purchases. But it’s not just helping the company you bought a product or service from online. Many websites, including retail outlets and others, will also sell your info to other advertisers, retailers, and data collection or retention entities. That can seem harmless enough—except that most people would probably prefer their history with websites not be shared when those sites involve an illness they suffer from, an addiction, adult purchases, personal debts, or anything else with a stigma attached to it. Even brick-and-mortar businesses participate in this information marketplace. They will often ask for your email address when you complete a purchase. This is exactly the kind of information that data brokers will pay for. Third-Party Tracking As uncomfortable as the thought of a website sharing your preferences, quirks, and b...

Even without the recent revelations about Facebook sharing user data, it would be hard for anyone who has spent time online to be unaware that information about us is being shared with entities that are using that info to make money. Just one creepily-specific targeted ad is generally enough to clue us in. What probably would come as a surprise is how incredibly personal the information about you being bought and sold is. If you don’t like the idea of your (most) private details being tracked, stored, quantified, and leveraged like some impersonal commodity with every use of a search engine, you’re not alone. And fortunately, finding out how to remove personal information from Google can be easier than you’d think. How Data Brokers Get Your Information Data brokering is a multi-billion-dollar industry—and the people involved want the public to know as little about as possible. They glean information in countless ways, employing algorithms that track, collect, coll...