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How to Keep Your Family’s Online Information Safe

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The internet is forever. It’s a key point your family should know when trying to keep their information online safe. It can be a hassle to remove personal information from Google . While it’s better not to leak any personal details online in the first place, sometimes it can’t be helped, or is already too late. These tips will help you secure your family’s information and keep yourself and your children safe online. Remove Information From Data Broker Sites How do advertisers create targeted ads? Buying data from data broker sites is often the answer. Data broker sites collect and sell any personal details they can find on you. Your internet browsing habits, your address, and the name of your family members are among the tidbits they collect. Often, this is picked up by Google. It’s essential to know how to remove personal information from Google , usually done by removing your private information from data broker sites. You can do this yourself, though it is often...

How to Minimize Your Digital Footprint

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Your digital footprint is all of the information about you found online. This footprint includes your name, address, social media posts, content you have shared, IP address, and even your browsing history and personal details like your mother’s maiden name. This information can be posted by you or about you. Although your digital footprint can be useful when job hunting, proving you are a real person with real experience there are definite risks to such an easily found wealth of information about you online.  If you are trying to go off the grid, regain a bit of online anonymity, or help prevent identity theft, it’s a good idea to minimize your digital footprint. Knowing how to remove personal information from Google is only the first step. Delete or Deactivate Accounts   Deleting your Facebook and Twitter accounts is an obvious first step, but be sure to delete accounts on shopping sites like Amazon, Target, or Old Navy as well. Don’t forget old social ...

How to Avoid Internet Scams That Take Advantage of Decent People

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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...

The Frightening and Lingering Consequences of Identity Theft (and How to Avoid Them)

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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...

How to Deal with Online Shaming and Harassment

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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...

Cyberstalking: How to Avoid Being Stalked Online

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Stalking is one of the most distressing, frustrating, frightening, insidious, and potentially dangerous crimes there is. Unfortunately, one of the downsides of the Age of Information is that the internet has made stalking far easier and often less risky for the stalker. People now have access to far more personal information, and far more convenient access to it, than they ever have in the past. And a lot of that information is willingly provided by all of us.  The key to avoiding, and halting, cyberstalking is the removal of private information from the internet. Whether that is from social media sites, date broker sites, or you set off to remove personal information from Google , erasing your private data that has been public and locking it down is the best weapon against cyberstalking. Social Media Lockdown Social media provides would-be stalkers with a wealth of personal information. A stranger could have immediate access to your name, birthday, relationshi...

The Most Useful Web Services to Optimize Your Privacy Online

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There’s something to be said for fighting fire with fire, especially when you don’t have any other choice. In this case, the fire being fought is the compromising of your personal information on the internet. Of course, there’s a (sort of) surefire way to ensure that your private information isn’t tracked, collected, bought, sold, and otherwise aggregated and traded online: Not going on the internet. Of course, that’s not feasible for most people. That’s where fire to fight fire becomes necessary: Using web services and information on the internet against the internet sites that are collecting and trading your private information. These strategies range from passive protection to learning how to remove personal information from Google to going in and opting out of the data broker sites. Here are some of the best web services to ensure that your (often very ) private information remains private. Have I Been Pwned? Email is one of the primary ways in which personal inf...