5 Ways to Protect Your Digital Footprint

This can show you the type of information that’s readily available about you. If you find sensitive data you don’t want revealed — or if you come across information that’s incorrect, misleading or inappropriate — contact the site administrator to request removal of the material.

After performing your search, consider setting up alerts to more easily keep track of your online mentions in the future. With an alert, you’ll receive a notification whenever your name appears online.

Service providers for social media, e-commerce, email, search engines, web browsers and others give their users the ability to manage the privacy settings for their accounts.

Using more restrictive settings can help reduce your digital footprint. The National Cybersecurity Alliance provides direct links to manage privacy settings for many popular sites.

Just be aware, though, that increasing your security may interfere with some of the usability of the site or lead to other drawbacks. For example, deleting your search history can make it more inconvenient when doing future searches. Or blocking pop-up ads or disabling cookies may prevent you from seeing ads or offers you’d normally welcome. Although the benefit of greater privacy is often worth these trade-offs, you should understand the implications of your actions before making any changes.

Also, when managing your privacy settings, take a couple of minutes to review the company’s privacy policy. It’s important to understand how an organization collects, stores, protects and utilizes your personal data. If you feel a policy is too intrusive, it’s best to just move along. Your privacy and security are too valuable.

Even if you adopt stronger privacy settings, you still should be judicious about what you choose to reveal about yourself online.

You might want to proudly post a picture of your new grandchild on a social media account. But remember that anything you share online can be re-shared by friends, family members and colleagues without your consent. And once that happens, it’s out of your control who will end up seeing your information.

Whenever you grant a mobile app access to your photos, location, camera, contacts and other information, it makes your data available to the app owner. Be selective before giving an app permission to all the types of information it requests. Keep in mind that many apps will still work even if all permissions aren’t granted.

Having a lot of online accounts leads to a bigger footprint. However, you can quickly reduce your footprint by deleting or deactivating accounts you no longer need. Be selective about opening new accounts, too. For a site you don’t plan to use frequently, it may make more sense to check out as a guest instead of creating an account.

While having fewer accounts can make managing your footprint easier, you should also think before linking accounts. Some service providers allow you to register with their business by using an account you have with another company. For instance, maybe they’ll invite you to sign in through your Facebook or Google account.

Doing so grants these other organizations access to even more information about your online activities, which means you’ll need to decide if the convenience is worth the potential added exposure.