Strategies to Help Protect Your Digital Footprint

Doing an online search about yourself may seem a bit vain. But it’s a good way to see the type of information that’s readily available about you. Try this with multiple search engines and explore the first several pages of results.

Be prepared to be surprised, though, by what you uncover. It can be alarming. 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.

To help eliminate results from other individuals with your same name, you can add keywords to your search that are associated with you (such as your hometown). 

Service providers for social media, e-commerce, email, search engines, web browsers, online conferencing and more often 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 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. For example, use caution when responding to social media surveys as they can reveal personal information.

Or, 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. So, 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. For example, is it necessary to have several email accounts? And what about that account you opened three years ago with an online retailer that you haven’t used since?

Be selective about opening new accounts, too. If you have the choice of checking out as a guest with a retailer instead of creating an account, it’s better to use that option unless you plan to be a frequent customer.