Data Privacy Week 2025
If you didn’t know already, now you do – it’s Data Privacy Week (January 27 to 31)! The brainchild of the National Cybersecurity Alliance, it aims to arm you with everything you need to spot and avoid the biggest risks to your data privacy and “Take control of your data”.
There’s never been a better time to re-evaluate how much of your personal data is floating around online than during Digital Privacy Week. While the internet has made life more convenient, it’s come at the cost of our privacy. Once you start digging into it, you’ll realize that some of your information is exposed on the internet in ways you might not have intended.
While it’s difficult to do so, taking back control of your digital privacy is totally possible. It’s tedious and methodical work, but once you’ve hunted down every last bit of information about yourself it’s just a matter of applying good data privacy practices going forward.
If you’re up for the challenge, I’ve got five ways that you can immediately improve your data privacy by removing your online presence.
Social media platforms want you to share every facet of your personal life and map out as many of your social relationships as possible. The more content you produce, the more engagement other users have with the site, and the more ad clicks can be sold. If you want to get a handle on your online presence, the first stop should be moving away from the likes of Facebook and Instagram.
It’s a pity, because they’re great tools for keeping up to date with the people in your life. Unfortunately, they’re also a goldmine for third parties who want to spy on you. Even if we forget about the pervasive privacy violations that advertisers commit every day, cybercriminals are constantly looking out for more information they can use to carry out identity fraud and scams.
Even the photos we upload contain valuable metadata that can tell a hacker when and where a picture was taken (you should make sure you have this turned off on your phone, by the way).
If you truly want to disappear online, deleting your social media accounts is a must. However, since there’s no universal way to erase all accounts at once, you’ll need to log in to each platform separately and manually deactivate your account. Most platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, provide deletion options, but some require a waiting period before complete removal. While you’re at it, make sure to remove any associated email addresses and phone numbers to minimize traces of your online identity.
2. Remove your other accounts, too
Once you’ve got the social media out of the way, it’s time to start checking out the other accounts you use. Pretty much any shopping platform you’ve signed up to will monitor the purchases you make and sell it on, so they’re out. Dating profiles? Same deal with your demographic information. Even seemingly innocuous subscription services will usually ask you if you consent to marketing, so make sure these are scrubbed too.
Generally, you want to erase any app that asks to collect data on you, as well as anything that other users can access publicly. Each of these accounts contributes to your digital footprint, increasing the risk of data breaches and privacy invasions.
Each account contributes to your digital footprint, increasing the risk of data breaches and privacy invasions
It isn’t easy to remember every single one, but there are a few steps you can take to make the job a little more thorough. If you enter your details into Have I Been Pwned, you can see every account related to a data breach in the past. Of course, it’s a good idea to change your passwords first if you’re involved in a breach, but it’ll give you a good idea of which old accounts are collecting dust.
Next, your password manager will doubtless have some accounts lurking in it that you haven’t touched in years. Checking back through your email inbox is also a great way to see which accounts you’ve signed up for. Even your social media profiles might be linked up to services you no longer want to use.
Some platforms allow for instant deletion but keep in mind that compliance can take time. In some cases, you may need to directly contact customer support to ensure your data is fully removed.
3. Check out search engines
Even after deleting your accounts, leftover traces are indexed through search engines like Google. These could include your name, phone number, or email, so perform a self-search with each piece of information you think is relevant to you on every major search engine. They all bring up different results, so you’re going to have to be thorough.
In response to increasing global legislation against identity data hoarding, especially the EU’s “right to be forgotten” rulings, Google now allows you to request the removal of information relating to yourself through their content removal tool. There’s no guarantee it’ll work, however, as there has to be some legal basis for the request, which varies by jurisdiction. Still, it’s worth a shot.
In the meantime, you’ll be able to use the search results to track down and remove those last few accounts yourself. Just remember that cached versions of deleted pages might still be accessible for some time.
4. Investigate data brokers
At this point, you’ve probably scrubbed most of what you can from the public internet. However, your data is still being traded behind the scenes. Data brokers collect and sell personal data to marketers, businesses, and even scammers. Without realizing it, your data could be in the hands of dozens of brokers, making it critical to remove yourself from their databases.
The kicker is that there are hundreds of these companies out there and it’s difficult to know which ones to trust. Some of them may hold your data in an anonymized format, and others may simply bury you under paperwork until you stop bothering them. This is where tools like Incogni come into play, which handle all of the data requests on your behalf in return for a monthly subscription.
5. Use a VPN
VPNs won’t erase any data that’s already on the internet. That’s what all of the steps you’ve gone through previously are for. What they do is make it significantly more difficult for third-party snoopers, like ad agencies and your ISP, to collect new data.
A VPN makes it significantly more difficult for third-party snoopers to collect new data
Without getting too deep into the technical stuff, a VPN encrypts your internet traffic so that nobody can read it while it’s in transit to its destination. That means your ISP can’t record your browsing history, and nor can the owner of the public Wi-Fi you’re using. A VPN also hides your address by masking your current home IP address with their server IP, which could be located in another country entirely.
Some VPNs also come with built-in ad-blocking technology which stops ads at the DNS level, so they never even load on your computer. There are also a few out there that have integrated privacy tools that block ads at the browser level too.
Why erase your online presence?
Bringing us back around to the theme of Digital Privacy Week, taking control of your data is about just that: control over who gets to see what in your life.
You might be comfortable sharing intimate details about yourself with loved ones, but you also want the control that ensures hackers can’t launch identity theft attacks using your data. By erasing your online presence, you prune back everything that’s unnecessary and end up making better decisions about what you’re willing to put out there.
It’s definitely a drastic step to completely remove yourself from the internet, and along the way, you might realize there’s one or two accounts you’re willing to leave up. The important thing is that you’re the one making this decision about your data!