GoKawiilIt’s never been easier for spammers and scammers to get access to your personal data, and this is particularly dangerous during tax season.
With data brokers providing easy access to your phone number, email address, physical address – and even sensitive data like your social security number – tax season can be peak time for fraud. Fortunately, there’s a simple way to reduce the risk.
A simple name search can reveal a surprising amount of personal data. This can include your address, phone number, age, job and even family connections. This is exactly the sort of data used by criminals to commit identity theft and other forms of fraud.
It’s no accident that all of this information is so widely available. It’s systematically purchased and collated by data brokers who then make it available for sale to marketeers and other third parties.
Despite occasional talk of lawmakers or regulators intervening, data broking remains a perfectly legal business, taking advantage of the small-print we frequently agree to when registering to use a website or buying an app. Deliberately vague terms like “sharing data with partners” is code for selling it to data brokers who will then sell it on to others.
Even strong device privacy like Apple’s isn’t enough to protect you: your digital footprint extends well beyond individual devices and the Apple ecosystem.
The law does allow you to opt out, but manually identifying all of the companies holding your data, and issuing removal requests, is an incredibly labor-intensive task. Even if you succeed in tracking down everything out there, brokers frequently re-add personal information to their databases, and new broker websites appear all the time.
Fortunately, there’s a much easier solution.
Incogni’s data-erasure service
Instead of you having to contact hundreds of different companies, jumping through whatever hoops they put in your way, you can outsource the work to data-removal service Incogni.
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