How To Remove Personal Information Off The Web
Not as difficult as it seems
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Thanks to numerous companies and data brokers harvesting, buying, and selling our personal identifiable information (PII), it’s all over the World Wide Web. It's so easy for anyone with the time and resources to access it. It's a huge privacy concern since that data is not supposed to be accessible to others.
Luckily, there are ways you can remove your PII from the web. Doing so will make it harder for someone to create a profile on you and gives you a peace of mind that your information isn’t readily available.
Remove Personal Information Yourself
Removing personal information manually is the best and quickest way, though it is tedious to do. Thankfully, I found a fantastic guide from IntelTechniques that shows you all the sites that could have your PII and provides you with information on how to remove it. They also have a data request, credit freeze, and credential exposure removal guide as well, so they have all bases covered.
IntelTechniques Data Removal Guide - https://inteltechniques.com/workbook.html
Use a data removal service
There are many companies that, if you pay a monthly or yearly fee, will remove your PII for you. Companies such as DeleteMe, Optery, and EasyOptOuts are popular ones. Going this route can make the process of removing your PII easier as you don’t have to do it yourself and these services have the time and tools that could make them more effective to remove them.
However, I am very skeptical about these services. One, because it seems like you have to provide them more information to remove said information, which feels odd. Two, because there’s really no way to know if they are removing your PII. Three, last year, research claimed that paying for a data removal service isn’t really worth it and argues that manually removing the information yourself is much more effective.
If you choose to use a data removal service, I highly recommend you do your research on which data removal service is the most consistent.
Feel free to share your experience of removing your personal information off the web.
Until Next Time,
Monique 🔐
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Additional Readings:
I found another resource that allows you to remove your personal information off the web. As the name suggests, Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List is a big ass list of ways to remove your personal information out of data brokers hands. Though it seems to cover the same ground as the one from IntelTechniques, there's no harm in using two similar resources with the same goal. Check it out!
https://github.com/yaelwrites/Big-Ass-Data-Broker-Opt-Out-List
Exactly! This is why I'm weary about using stuff like DeleteMe. They might actually be good, and I'll have to do more research before I make a decision, but just like you stated here, it's weird that we pretty much have to give them more information in order for them to remove that information. Like what are THEY doing with the information we provide them? Help someone! lol