How to Audit Your Digital Identity

Welcome back to your 5 min daily read of Nosy Eye. We give you hilariously simple, yet effective measures you can take to guard your [valuable] privacy.

Here’s what we got for you today:

• How to run a digital privacy audit on your identity before someone else does

• What to do with all that data

• Action Tip of the Day

Seeing yourself in search results used to be cool. Now…not as much

We got ahead of ourselves earlier this week and should’ve started with this topic.

The most important thing in guarding your privacy is having a rock-solid understanding of how much information about you is publicly available.

Without knowing this, you’re blindly putting up guardrails and being ineffective with your time and resources.

Here’s your order of operations:

1. The easiest first step ever → Start with the big search engines.

We’re talking about the big boys 👇

• Google

• Bing

• Yandex

• Duck Duck Go

• Yahoo

• Baidu

If you want to go a bit deeper, search through Startpage, Qwant, and SearX.

2. Search for things that could be tied to you.

The basics like your Name, Home Address, Relative Names, School, and Occupation will get you started down the rabbit hole of yourself, but it normally doesn’t stop there as it depends on your lifestyle. 

Here are a few more things to search for:

• Usernames

• Email addresses

• Phone numbers

• Reverse image searches of your pictures

This will take some time. We advise you to take a few minutes each day to run different search queries about yourself.

It will feel less cumbersome and will be more like a treasure hunt as you comb through the trove of data.

3. Document everything you find.

You’ve collected all this data about yourself to have it removed (or altered). However, as mentioned earlier, you need to know where it lives first.

Simplest way to think about this is imagine you’re building a dossier about yourself before your rivals do. 

So think from their shoes. What would be valuable? …Even the smallest details matter.

Please, please, please do not complicate this step.

Simply do whatever works for you in order to document this effectively:

• Spreadsheet

• Notepad

• Notes on your phone

• Whatever

The goal should be to make it super easy for yourself to carry this step out. If you over-complicate this, you’ll be discouraged by the difficulty and stop. Then your data stays out there for the wolves.

The Opt-Out Processes Begins

You’ve got a pretty fat dossier on at least 90% of your digital life. Now, you’re ready to expunge as much of it as you can.

What you’re going to do is look through that list of websites, apps, services, etc. you collected and you’re going to do the following:

• Delete your account (if applicable)

• Request that data be removed from their systems

This is the easiest part because you’re just pressing a button to opt-out or sending an email to request your info be removed.

Depending on the sources of personal data/services, your mileage will vary with how much work needs to be done.

Our advice? Go after the larger data marketing sites in removing the bulk of your online digital footprint. 

The following data marketers serve as fountainheads of which data flows out from them to all the other lower tier services. You probably recognize some of them:

• Whitepages

• Spokeo

• Lexis Nexis

• TruePeopleSearch

• Been Verified

They are legally obligated to delete your data if you request it.

You should not, under any circumstance, be emailing your photo ID to confirm your identity. 

But many of these services will ask for other information to verify your identity.

These are data marketing companies. Assume everything you give them could be potentially sold. Proceed accordingly.

Action Tip: Establish Your Personal Privacy Policy

The internet wasn’t designed with privacy and security in mind. Removing yourself from the picture, however, isn’t realistic either.

What’s more effective is being private in plain sight. Take a few steps back first.

Here’s your action tip for the day:

Examine your daily life to establish your Personal Privacy Policy (PPP).

If you don’t really use the internet much, then your focus would be aimed towards maintaining physical privacy (we’ll cover this later).

On the flip side, if you spend a lot of time using digital products then you need to be focused on your online privacy.

For most people, their privacy posture generally fits somewhere in between the two spectrums mentioned above. First, find out what your exposure is before playing with random tools.

That's all we have for you today. There's plenty more, of course, but then you'll think we're really crazy.

Not that we care, but it's better that you get this info in bytes so you can actually do something about it.

But if you want more, reply "I want to eat" and we'll cook something up for you.

Anyways, bye for now.

DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is strictly educational and some entertainment. Please do not use easily identifiable data online, as you do not know who is going to give it away.