Keep safe online – Incogni’s top tips for protecting your personal information

Cybercrime is at an all-time high as the world shifts towards going fully digital, making protecting your personal information essential.

The easiest way to protect your personal data from malicious parties is by scrubbing your personal information from the Internet.

• Click here to learn more about how to remove your online personal data.

While this may seem daunting, Incogni, a world-renowned data protection service, has compiled a list of steps and tricks to help you secure your online data.

We have outlined the major tips Incogni recommends, below.

Websites and data brokers

The first step to protecting your online persona is to remove unnecessary personal information that is already publicly available – such as the content on search sites or data brokers.

There are two ways for this. The first is manually finding and scrubbing this data – but this is very difficult and time-consuming.

The better option is to invest in a data removal service such as Incogni.

Incogni takes care of the data discovery process, and will continuously send removal requests to new and existing data brokers on your behalf.

To remove your data from Google, the search engine provides a dedicated tool that lets you delete your information from search results.

Finally, turn off your tracking and location services and delete any stored data to limit the amount of personal data that makes its way online in the first place.

Data breach security

Your next step for protecting your online persona is to delete information vulnerable to data breaches, including social media profiles and unused accounts.

For social media, if deleting your account is too drastic, you can set your account to be private and remove as much personal data as possible.

Deleting unused accounts, especially those used for shopping, is also essential for maintaining your security, as many of these sites will still store your data even if you haven’t used them for years.

Unsubscribing from marketing lists and emailers is the final part of this step.

Marketing companies often collect information like your spending habits, household costs, and even job details – all of which they must dispose of when you opt out.

Data harvesting

The third step is to manage devices and apps that harvest your data on a day-to-day business.

This is easily done by going into such devices’ settings and restricting data collection.

For iPhones, this is found under the app privacy report setting, and for Android, you can do this through the permission manager.

You should also delete unused apps and restrict the sharing of personal information with smart devices like TVs and speakers.

Click here to learn more about how to remove your online personal data.