Data Diet: Introduction

Many of us are carrying around some serious digital baggage. In this blog series, I’m going to help you trim the fat – a data diet, if you will. And in the process, improve both your privacy and your security.

Digital Baggage

The world wide web is over 30 years old now. The internet as most of us think of it today started with dial-up services from AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe and others in the 1993 time frame, shortly after Sir Tim Berners-Lee and CERN made the world wide web available for everyone. That means that many of us have online accounts that span 2-3 decades. Do you remember them all? What do you think the odds are that some of those accounts are still active?

Regardless of when you first got on the internet, you’ve probably created several dozen – maybe even hundreds – of online accounts. Every one of those accounts is a potential weak link. They not only contain data about you that could be leaked or stolen, this data could be used by bad guys for nefarious purposes or by data brokers to track and profile you. How good is the security on those old accounts? Yeah…. probably not good.

Trimming the Digital Fat

All of these old accounts could be data time bombs waiting to go off. They may have weak or reused passwords. They probably don’t have two-factor authentication. But they probably do have personal data in them that may be being actively shared or sold. They may all use a single email address or other identifying information that allows data brokers (or cyber criminals) to link those to accounts other, juicier accounts. If you ever used “Sign in with Google/Facebook/Twitter” then those Big Tech companies will still have access to those accounts and the associated data, too.

In this series of articles, I’m going to give you several methods to find and catalog your old accounts. Your memory is human and fallible, but there are actually a lot of digital breadcrumbs that will help you rediscover accounts that you’ve long forgotten. The goal is to delete or neutralize as many of those old accounts as possible. For the rest, we’ll make sure to beef up their security and do what we can to prevent data brokers from cross-correlating the data with your other accounts. In the cybersecurity and privacy realm, this is all about reducing your attack surface and your digital footprint.

Data Diet Plan

In the coming weeks, I’ll be creating a series of articles that will:

1. Give you tools and techniques to build an exhaustive list of all your online accounts.
2. Help you find and download historical data that you may have forgotten you even had.
3. Help you delete old, unneeded online data that could be used for tracking or identity theft.
4. Tell you how to delete or at least neutralize your unused accounts.

Note that – like dieting to lose weight – there will be other benefits to this exercise, as well, including:

1. Help you document all of your online accounts. This will also be valuable to your next of kin.
2. Give you the opportunity to maximize the security of the accounts you want to keep.
3. Save money by deleting old subscriptions you forgot about or perhaps find accounts containing funds.
4. You may be able to squelch some sources of spam and junk mail.
5. You’ll learn about some interesting online tools that you may be able to use for other purposes.

The next article will help you find and organize all of your online accounts – particularly ones you’re no longer actively using.