Search engines are hungry for YOUR information. After all, this is the digital information age, and many businesses have found that your personal information is actually worth a lot of money. So here are our best 5 tips for minimizing the information online databases collect about you, and how to limit the amount of unwanted content that will show up in your Google search.
1. Skip The Details
When you sign up as a user for a website or any online service, provide the least amount of information you actually need to register. If at all possible, only include your name and a contact email address. This can be a catch 22- in order to rank web profiles in your Google search results they need to have a good amount of content related to you but most users also want to limit their privacy. Some websites will try to incentivize you with free gifts to give them even more information, but do not fall for their tricks. More often than not things that appear to be free online usually end up costing you.
A good compromise is to put up "fluff content" that is loosely about you and your interests, but contains very little info specific to your personal, private life. Writing about hobbies, interests, or generic professional info works well just remember- don't put it online if you don't want the whole world to see it. Even with privacy settings on information has a way of spreading around. As a safe bet, don't put addresses, phone numbers, emails, or your zip code on public pages if you can avoid it.
2. Do a Safety Check BEFORE You Pay
There are always a few things a savvy online shopper will check before entering sensitive personal financial data onto a website. One of the most important things you can do is to check if the site is secure.
In order to do this simply look at the top of your screen where the web address is displayed, and check for https:// in the web address the "s" after the "http" means that the site is secure. Having a secure site means that the data sent between you and the given website is being encrypted, or scrambled, so online thieves will not be able to steal your information.
You should also check for a padlock displayed at the bottom of your web browser screen. When the padlock is closed, you are at a secure site. If that padlock is open on any page where you are asked to give sensitive information, you should assume that the site is not secure, and we would recommend not doing business with that entity.
3. Have Dedicated Online Payment Methods
In the unfortunate event that some of your financial data is stolen, you will be much better off if all your money is not in one place. We suggest having a credit card that is dedicated to your online shopping needs. Having a dedicated online card makes it much easier to track and dispute any unauthorized transactions.
Another very popular alternative is to use an online payment service such as PayPal or Checkout by Amazon. These services can eliminate a great deal of risk when it comes to paying online. All of these services are armed with the latest anti-fraud technology to keep purchases safe. The only true downside to these online payment services is that there are still a few web vendors out there that will not accept them as payment.
4. Get off the pesky people search databases
This may be the most important tip we have to offer in this article- get off the people search databases! Sites like Intelius, Spokeo, and Pipl scour the internet for public documents and other information that is legally available in local communities about you, your home value, your income, even your shopping habits and political views. In fact, these sites may even have a satellite photo of your home online. The people databases will then sell this personal information to marketing agencies who will in turn deliver more targeted adds to consumers and try to make a buck off you.
So where does this information come from? Surprisingly, often not from the internet although social networks and online shopping services do scrape some of your information. No, most of this information comes from your local brick-and-mortar public records office. Signing up for a credit card, buying a car, or even paying a bill could mean your information will end up being shared in an online database. There are a good number of somewhat shady online databases that are able to extract money out of every last piece of information they find.
The solution? most of these databases legally are required to remove your records from their database if you send them a formal request to remove your information. Each people search database is slightly different- some require you to send or fax a letter, some require a simple phone call, and Intelius even requires you fax them a photo of your driver's license to prove you're you. This may seem counterintuitive - faxing an information company a private personal document to remove your other info, but it is in fact totally safe and only used as a method of verification.
The only problem with this is that every 6 months you will have to re-submit your request to delete the info because new instances of your information will be found and added to the databases. It can be extremely tedious, but the only real option to fully remove the information is to contact databases you appear in one by one until they remove your records, and there are hundreds of such sites out there.
If that doesn't work, there's always one last option we recommend...
5. Feed Google!
If people search databases are making you lose sleep at night, we believe the best thing you can do is develop a strong web presence by feeding Google with safe, relevant information. This should be information that properly represents you to the world, and is content you are comfortable sharing.
As we just mentioned, you could hours and days trying to track down and eliminate your personal information from all the online databases, and even then it can spring back up as the people search sites find new info. The most surefire way to make sure people do not find this data is to bury it far back in your search results by using reputation management tactics.
Remember that people usually look no more than 2 pages in a search engine's results page. This means if you can fill up those first two pages with links to sites are full of positive information about yourself, no one will see your personal information! The good news in this arena is these people search databases often aren't very SEO optimized so they are often easy to bump off those first few pages with our methods.
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