Image: Incogni
Try searching your full name online right now and see what surfaces. Within a few clicks, you’re likely seeing your home address, phone number, age, and even details about family members.
If that’s what a simple search turns up, just imagine what malicious actors can find when their business relies on exploiting your personal data. If there was a big red delete button, you’d set a new record for how fast you could smash it!
The problem is there isn’t one, unless you know where to look…
How your personal information ends up everywhere
Despite Apple’s best privacy protection efforts, your data is already out there for public consumption and spammer exploitation. How did this happen in the first place?
Your iPhone’s privacy features are stellar, but if you use the internet as I suspect you are now, your digital life extends beyond Apple’s safe garden. You browse on work computers, shop on public wifi, and leave traces across devices that don’t have Apple’s privacy protections.
Data brokers are constantly harvesting these digital breadcrumbs. They pull information from public records, social media activity, online purchases, and more. Then they package and sell this information to marketing companies, risk assessment firms, and it regularly lands in the hands of scammers.
This is why you get robocalls even though you never gave out your number and targeted by cybercriminals even though you make smart technology choices.
Why removing your data manually doesn’t work
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