The Most Useful Web Services to Optimize Your Privacy Online

There’s something to be said for fighting fire with fire, especially when you don’t have any other choice. In this case, the fire being fought is the compromising of your personal information on the internet. Of course, there’s a (sort of) surefire way to ensure that your private information isn’t tracked, collected, bought, sold, and otherwise aggregated and traded online: Not going on the internet. Of course, that’s not feasible for most people.

That’s where fire to fight fire becomes necessary: Using web services and information on the internet against the internet sites that are collecting and trading your private information. These strategies range from passive protection to learning how to remove personal information from Google to going in and opting out of the data broker sites. Here are some of the best web services to ensure that your (often very) private information remains private.

Have I Been Pwned?

Email is one of the primary ways in which personal information can be compromised online. There is the risk of malware, spyware, adware, worms, Trojan horses, phishing, spear phishing, and number of other viruses and cyber threats. It’s just one of the reasons that taking security and privacy precautions online is so important. It also raises the question: How do I know if my email address has already been compromised?

One way to answer this question is to utilize the web service Have I Been Pwned (HIBP). Just plug your email address into their site to find out whether or not your email is among those that have been compromised by big hacking incidents.

Disposable Email

Finding out whether or not your email has been hacked is obviously an incredibly helpful service to have access to. More important though is to guarantee that your email is not hacked in the first place. One of the best possible ways to do this is to contract with a reputable privacy-protection and security-providing organization to “mask” your email address. Blur does exactly that and provides a variety of masking and privacy measures, including masking credit and debit card numbers.

Blur creates unlimited Masked Email addresses for you. With a Blur Masked Email address, whenever you have to provide your email to a third-party website, the address you give will not lead directly back to your personal inbox. So anyone hoping to use personal information from your email, or bombard you with anything spammy or scammy, will be dealing with a temporary proxy inbox. And if anything in it looks fishy, you can simply turn it off.

DeleteMe

DeleteMe is a privacy and security-protection service that allows you to remove personal information from Google as well as data broker sites. It does this by contacting data broker sites and insisting that they delete your personal information. Data brokers specialize in the buying and selling of personal information, largely to financial interests hoping to use your data for marketing and advertising.

As obnoxious as it is to be bombarded with “legitimate” spam ads and offers and everything else that accompanies financial interests getting your info, that’s not necessarily the biggest risk. Unfortunately, data brokers are not real discerning about who they sell your information to. As well, your information being out on the internet also puts you at greater risk of identity theft, hacking, scams, theft, and the like. 

About DeleteMe

DeleteMe has set the industry standard for optimizing the security and data privacy of anyone online. From their home base in Boston, DeleteMe has established a reputation within the privacy and security industry by combining the expertise of their privacy experts with the most effective security technology and strategies, with which they have provided more than 10 million consumer opt-outs successfully. Let DeleteMe secure the privacy of your data. They will ensure that your private information removal from Whitepages and the other data broker sites keeps your personal details as safe as possible.

Ensure that your personal information remains private with DeleteMe, at www.joindeleteme.com.