What the internet knows about you
We asked Gerald Rich, Axios senior developer of news products, to write this after he gave an eye-opening presentation (“Dox and Lox”) over bagels at a recent staff retreat:
Any search engine can quickly reveal your phone number, address and family information with a surprising level of detail.
- It can be instantly culledon the open web from sites like White Pages and Spokeo.
Why it matters: This information, combined with social media posts, can be used by anyone to intimidate, harass, or stalk high-visibility people like politicians, business leaders, celebrities and journalists.
- And it’s getting easier for trolls to find specific information about all of us as we got about our daily lives.
Here’s how to reduce your online footprint:
- Go to one of the listsof people aggregator sites, like the one provided by IntelTechniques, and go through the opt-out steps.
- Don’t provideany additional, optional, or new information like a driver’s license or phone number, and consider making a burner email just to receive opt-out confirmations.
- Opting out of all of themis harder than unsubscribing from an email. So aim for reducing the amount of information available, rather than attempting to go completely off the grid.
What else you can do:
- IntelTechnique’sfull list of people finder sites with associated opt-out steps.
- The New York Times information security teamhas a tip sheet, including links to some of the largest people finder sites that regularly appear in search results.
- The Privacy Rights Clearinghousealso provides a consumer guide detailing the specifics of government records and public versus private information.
The bottom line: These sites don’t necessarily delete your records from their database if you opt out. But they can make you a more difficult target for people to quickly pinpoint.
Πηγή: axios.com
