In Minnesota, a terrorist weaponized personal information from data brokers to carry out a political assassination. Here's how you can remove your data from such sites.
It is a pain in the ass for sure! With personal privacy protection, it is important not to let perfect be the enemy of good, however. You don’t have to outrun the bear, as they say. You just need to make yourself a harder target than everyone else and hope the bear passes you over.
A comment that we've worked for years to try to have information removed, including hiring outside assistance - it is not easy, not foolproof, the data collectors work overtime and there are a lot of them.
Good advice and something we all need to be more aware of.
Oh you're not wrong at all. It's a pain in the ass. I did the first round manually. I then tried to keep up with it over the years but prioritizing the low hanging fruit. That involves doing a Google Search for yourself and then prioritizing the opt-outs for anything that comes up in the first 10 pages of search results. It also involves checking the bigger platforms (like Whitepages, Intelius) who are feeders for dozens of other, smaller platforms who are really just white label affiliate sites. This is not comprehensive, but it removes the data from the most likely places that a private party bad actor will look. A determined bad actor or the government will still be able to find you though. For the determined, private bad actors, I pay for both DeleteMe and Optery. For the government...well, there's not much any of us can do there. If the FBI or the NSA want you, they're gonna get you. But, as they say, you don't need to outrun the bear. You need to outrun the easier prey.
It is a pain in the ass for sure! With personal privacy protection, it is important not to let perfect be the enemy of good, however. You don’t have to outrun the bear, as they say. You just need to make yourself a harder target than everyone else and hope the bear passes you over.
A comment that we've worked for years to try to have information removed, including hiring outside assistance - it is not easy, not foolproof, the data collectors work overtime and there are a lot of them.
Good advice and something we all need to be more aware of.
Cloaked, deleteme, Optery and others do help. It’s an ongoing process.
Feels endless, some weeks.
Once you do the major big shift, it only takes minutes of maintenance on a regular basis.
We’ve shifted several things, get alerts… it still feels like “a lot” some days: “oh good… more of this crap”
Yes: a first-world problem, PIA (yes, I’m having a grumpy Thursday)
Oh you're not wrong at all. It's a pain in the ass. I did the first round manually. I then tried to keep up with it over the years but prioritizing the low hanging fruit. That involves doing a Google Search for yourself and then prioritizing the opt-outs for anything that comes up in the first 10 pages of search results. It also involves checking the bigger platforms (like Whitepages, Intelius) who are feeders for dozens of other, smaller platforms who are really just white label affiliate sites. This is not comprehensive, but it removes the data from the most likely places that a private party bad actor will look. A determined bad actor or the government will still be able to find you though. For the determined, private bad actors, I pay for both DeleteMe and Optery. For the government...well, there's not much any of us can do there. If the FBI or the NSA want you, they're gonna get you. But, as they say, you don't need to outrun the bear. You need to outrun the easier prey.
also:
Hushed as phone number. Proton for email, calendar, VPN. Cryptpad to replace Google world, Brave as browser and search engine.
OsmandMap instead of google or apple maps.