Your Digital Footprint – Minimize what is known about you

I recently found this digital footprint article through Tech Radar

Minimising the size of your digital footprint can be achieved easily if you take the time to do some housekeeping. There are a variety of techniques you can use to reduce the digital trail that you leave:

1. Check all your privacy settings

Go to each of the websites you use most often and see what level of privacy you have set. This is especially important for social networks. And if you have included personal information on your profiles, consider removing, reducing or hiding this.

2. Remove old accounts

Search for your name on Google’s image search. The image search you do may reveal some old accounts you had forgotten about. You may not use them, but the internet never forgets. If you can’t delete these old accounts update them with a false name, email address and blank image. Google will eventually index these changes, which should mean they are removed from your digital footprint.

3. Unsubscribe from mailing lists

We all sign up for hundreds of newsfeeds and email newsletters, but often only read a fraction of these. Unsubscribe from the ones you don’t read will reduce the data available for personal profiling.

4. Register with a different email address

If you have to give an email address to a site for registration, have a secondary email address that you use for just this purpose. This will keep your personal inbox clean, but also misdirect anyone that is using this data for profiling. You could use a disposable email address from services such as Mailinator or AirMail.

5. Use stealth mode when browsing

The browser you use can also have its security and privacy settings tweaked to make your use of the internet more anonymous. The Chrome browser has Incognito Mode. Internet Explorer includes InPrivate Browsing. Firefox users have Private Window. And Safari users can also switch on private browsing from their browser’s security settings.

6. Think before you post

A great deal of the personal information that is now collected comes from social media. Being a little more restrained with your use of these networks will reduce the quantity of data that can be collected about you.

7. Tor browsing

The Tor internet browser offers high levels of anonymity, as it bounces all of your browser usage across several servers around the world making it impossible for anyone to track your internet sessions.

8. Use anti-tracking tools

There are a number of additional tools you can use to mask your internet browsing including Disconnect, Ghostery and DoNotTrackMe.