We give away our information and our privacy online so freely that most people don’t even think twice about taking steps to protect their anonymity on the web before it is too late.
The harm of bad actors getting their hands on your personal identifying information and passwords is amplified when they can easily find other details about your identity to impersonate or intimidate you, when the same password unlocks multiple accounts, and when they can find where these accounts are.
If your usernames, passwords, and other personal identifying information was compromised in a big data breach – or smaller data breach – there are steps you can take to mitigate the damage it could cause, and to protect your identity online moving forward.
1. Change your passwords. For each online account, change your password to a new strong password, with different passwords for all accounts. This way, one leaked password won’t compromise all of your accounts.
2 . Eliminate accounts you don’t use or rarely use. If you have online accounts that you don’t use anymore, or that you rarely use, close or delete them. This not only reduces the vectors of attack, but also eliminates the vulnerable points that you don’t pay close attention to.
3. Put your social media accounts on lockdown. This means using the strongest privacy settings for each account to prevent you from being found through that platform on a public search or on a general search engine search. This also means scrubbing your old posts and photos of as much personal identifying information as possible and being extremely careful about what you share in your posts in the future.
4. Take your name out of your email address. While it is intuitive to have your real name in your email so people know who you are when you contact them, this also easily identifies your account for those who have access to your user information, and those who want to target you for phishing scams, etc.
5. Remove yourself entirely from Facebook, Google, or even the internet entirely. This is a massive undertaking and does not happen quickly, but it is possible and depending on how serious the data breach was, disappearing may be the best course of action. This is not something that can easily be done on your own.
With the help of a firm or a Private Investigator, you can work together to meet your online privacy goals. Contact me at Mignolet@Bellsouth.net to consult and strategize to start taking steps to anonymize your identity on the internet.