Here’s how you can safeguard your privacy on the Internet

September 11, 2023

3 min read

Now there’s an efficient, stress-free way – and an exclusive offer for 9to5Mac readers – to take steps to protect personal information online.

How to keep your personal information safe

In addition to how Apple works to protect users’ privacy, you can take steps yourself to remove your personal information from the Internet or simply gain more control over your online presence.

One way is to conduct a thorough search for your name – along with other personal details such as date of birth and address – across various search engines and social media platforms. Make note of any websites or profiles that display your personal details. Then, contact those platforms and ask them to remove your information. Many websites have dedicated privacy policies and procedures for such requests.

Also, opt out of data broker websites that aggregate and sell personal information. Data on broker websites can be used for people searching, marketing, risk mitigation, and health purposes – or scams and phishing attempts. This can increase unwanted robocalls, influence loan eligibility or insurance rates, and increase the risk of identity theft.

Data broker platforms often allow individuals to submit opt-out requests. But there are a lot of data broker companies. So, that can be a pretty labor-intensive, lengthy process. Plus, you’ll need to keep checking back, as data brokers can – and do – add you right back into their databases.

Protect your personal information with Incogni

There’s also another way to tackle this challenge, and it’s a lot more efficient and a lot less stressful. You could reach out to a data removal service like Incogni, which offers an automated personal information removal service that will ferret out the data brokers most likely to be dealing in your personal data. It will then send out wave after wave of opt-out requests on your behalf.

And 9to5Mac readers exclusively get 55% off Incogni’s full annual price plans by using code “9to5mac” at checkout.

Incogni, which was created by cybersecurity company Surfshark, jumps through data companies’ hoops, adhering to each one’s particular removal procedure so that you don’t have to spend your valuable time doing so.

Incogni will deal with extra data broker interactions like rejection appeals, thus taking it off your to-do list of annoying tasks. And the best part? Incogni restarts the whole process every three months to keep your data out of circulation.

And when you want to see how it’s going, you can monitor progress – potential databases found, requests sent, requests completed – on your Incogni dashboard: