You’ve doubtless heard the oft-quoted saying that if you’re not the customer for a tech service, then you’re the product. That’s exactly the case for many free apps and services, where the money is made by selling your personal data to data brokers.
In the most innocuous of cases, data such as your location and known interests is used to target you with personalised ads. But in the worst of cases, that data is either purchased or stolen by scammers and identity thieves …
Checking out the privacy policies of apps and web services can be an eye-opening business. They will often have a very lengthy list of data categories that are captured and stored, ranging from email address to live location.
Deeper in, you’ll generally find a vague-sounding phrase which gives them the right to sell that data. Typical wording here is along the lines of “sharing selected data with trusted partners.” What that innocent-sounding phrase actually means is that they can sell your personal details to data brokers, who make a living out of selling it to other people.
This can include the most sensitive personal information, such as your phone number, date of birth, and even your social security number.
Advertisers are queuing up to buy this data so that they can direct personalized ads to you, but data brokers also make extremely juicy targets for hackers who seek to steal the information for resale on the dark web.
Someone wanting to track you down can often find your phone number, home address, and workplace in just a few clicks.
The best safeguard is to remove as much of your personal data from the web and from data brokers. It is possible to do this manually, but it’s an extremely time-consuming, never-ending task. It involves contacting literally hundreds of different companies and jumping through the obstacles they deliberately place in your way to make data removal requests as difficult as possible – then doing it again, and again, and again.
Incogni is a company that can do this for you, not just once, but as an ongoing service, removing new data as fast as it is added.
Unlike similar sounding services, Incogni can remove your sensitive information from all types of data brokers, including those tricky People Search Sites. It keeps working even if you change address or jobs, ensuring that your information is gone for good.
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