Worried about your privacy and the information websites have on file about you? We take a look at how you can remove the lot
We live in a world of sharing. Most of us post on Facebook, and lots of us tweet our thoughts and intricate moments of our day-to-day lives. We use LinkedIn to detail the intricacies of our CVs, we set up blogs, and we sometimes even reveal our real identities on forums, merging alter egos with real life. We’re more open than ever before.
But there is an inherent danger in our actions. Not only are we putting ourselves out there – turning ourselves into minor celebrities in some cases – we are also allowing the websites we use to grab lots of details about us too. Each time we log into a service, we’re allowing all sorts of data to be collected and collated. Some sites know us better than some of our closest friends.
You may have spotted stark signs of this, whether it’s through adverts on websites that uncannily appear to know the kinds of products you’ve just been looking at or those emails that keep appearing that seem to have a good handle on what you most enjoy. Companies appear to stretch the boundaries when it comes to trying to get you to prise open your wallet and they do all they can to generate cash from your interests.
In order to do this, services draw on a digital profile that gets added to almost daily in some cases. And because we’ve been online for so many years, the level of detail is likely to be vast. Even if you’ve never visited Facebook, Twitter or any number of social media websites, and even if you’ve never touched an online survey, you’re not immune when it comes to the data grab.
Your searches, the videos you watch, the places you visit, the items you look at and the music you listen to all form part of a big fat file that is just waiting to be exploited. About the only good news is that very little of this information is actually made public. But as comfortable as you are about divulging something as trivial as what you had for dinner or something more contentious as whether you voted to leave or remain in the EU, it’s unlikely that you’d want everything collated.
So how do you remove it? Well, before we get on to that, we should briefly look at how you can stop websites from amassing data about you in the first place. This would seem the sensible option: rather than worry about what’s out there, you just call a halt to future gatherings. Yet that’s easier said than done. To be truly immune to data collection, you’d effectively need to stop using the internet.
Prevention Better Than Cure?
That said, there are some things you can do. Aside from only opening accounts that you know will prove useful in the longterm, you should look carefully at the privacy section of the terms and conditions of services and be canny when it comes to ticking boxes on sign-ups to ensure you’re not inadvertently giving permission for your data to be used by all and sundry.
You should also look at preventing advertisers from tracking where you go and the websites that you visit. A good way to do this is to use a browser extension that stops third-party trackers from collecting data about you. Privacy Badger (www.eff.org/privacybadger) by the Electric Frontier Foundation, for example, makes a note of services that seek to track your browser across many different websites.
When it spots a company following you around, it orders the browser to stop loading that source’s content. It’ll keep an eye on adverts, embedded images, stylesheets and maps just in case they contain cookies that are looking to track your browsing habits. Unlike other blocking tools, it will only act to bar a specific domain if it finds that it continues to track you after it has been ordered not to. That way, your general web browsing is unaffected.
It’s certainly preferable to blocking all cookies – something that is likely to affect your overall web experience. Issuing a block not only puts a stop to third-party cookies but first-party ones as well, and the latter can be useful on the sites that you use most often. They recognise who you are and remember the kinds of things you want to do on any given website, saving lots of time in the process. It’s all about striking a balance.
Exterminate, Exterminate
But what about the past and all of the stuff that the web’s many websites already know about you? How do you find out what’s out there, wipe the slate clean and delete information that you would rather they didn’t build up about you? The first thing you need to do is figure out which websites are most likely to have the most data about you. Step forward, Google.
Google collects data across all its services. When you sign up for an account, it grabs your name, email address, password, birthday, gender, phone number and country. It also has its own ad-tracking service, which learns a lot about your online behaviour. Every time you click or tap on an advert, it works out the type of things that interest you the most.
But that’s only the half of it. Google keeps tabs on your video viewing, the websites you visit, the things you search for, the emails you send via Gmail, the events you add on Calendar, your images, photos and documents on Drive and details of your device. It logs your IP address and cookie data, and it uses information gleaned from its Chrome web browser, and ChromeOS and Android operating systems.
We know this because Google appears transparent about its actions. Go to privacy.google.com/your-data.html, and you will see it’s not shy to admit what it takes from you each day. It seeks to justify what it does by telling you how it helps in autocompleting searches and forms, finding relevant videos and delivering automatic updates to flight info and sports results. That’s where the trust comes in, but thankfully, it’s something you can control.
A new service called My Activity has been launched by Google, providing a dashboard that lets you view all of the items that have been stored about your use of the web and its various services. By visiting myactivity.google.com/myactivity, you’re able to permanently remove data, and you can also tell Google which topics you do and don’t want to be associated with your account.
When you view the page, for instance, you will see it kicks off with the heading Today: an indication of the number of recorded items that have been noted since you woke up this morning. Don’t be surprised if this is already in the hundreds, since it’s likely that you use Google far more than you imagine. To help make sense of it, though, the data is broken down according to category, whether its Search, Books, Video, Image, News and so on. You will therefore see which services you’re using the most and to what degree. Everything is time-stamped.
From this point on, you can get down to the serious business of deletion. In the top right-hand corner of every box containing notes of the services you’ve used is a menu with just two options: Details and Delete. By clicking the latter, you’re shown a pop-up box, which tries to briefly explain just why it would prefer you not to delete anything: “your activity can make Google services more useful to you like better commute options in Maps and quicker results in Search”. Once you’ve selected that you’re pretty au fait with the whole business, you’re then asked to confirm if you want to go ahead and delete the items.
Personalising Adverts
Google also lets you control the information used in showing you advertisements. One of the biggest changes of late has been the company’s decision to use behavioural information about you to tailor adverts not just on Google’s own services but across the internet and on its search pages. Rather than automatically opt you in, though, you have to make that decision for yourself.
To turn ad personalisation on or off, visit goo.gl/M1NrqO and look for the box that will let Google use your account activity for advertising purposes. This page also lets you turn off data gathering for advertising purposes full stop and while you’re at it, you may as well take a look at your Google Profile on this page.
Tapping the edit button in the box lets you take a look at your personal information. Perhaps you’ll want to make a slight alteration to your date of birth so you’re not giving too much away, and maybe you’ll want to edit what others see about you. You can also turn location sharing on and off and manage your search settings from this page, thereby deleting your whereabouts from the system.
Facing Up To Facebook
But what of other services such as Facebook? It may feel perverse that you’ll want to prevent Facebook from keeping data about you (the whole point is that you put information on there for others to see), but it’s always worthwhile managing data that’s only going to be put to corporate use. Thankfully, Facebook lets you do this.
The first thing you may want to do is download a copy of your Facebook data and see what the company knows. On the desktop version, go to Settings and select and click ‘Download a copy of your Facebook data’ at the bottom of the general accounts settings. The information will contain lots of information about your profile as well as all your timeline information, posts, messages and photos.
Crucially, though, it will show the adverts you have clicked on and the IP addresses logged when you visit. You’ll see when your account was reactivated, deactivated, disabled or deleted, and any machine cookie and browser information. Your current address and past addresses are listed. Location information is retained too. The file contains ad topics based on your stated likes, interests and other data; any conversations and connections you have; facial recognition data; emails – even those you’ve deleted; linked accounts; notes; phone numbers; political views and much more.
It’s quite an eye-opener, and it goes well beyond the info gleaned from that time you posted a picture of a cat. But – and here’s the catch – if you want Facebook to remove everything it knows about you, then you’ll have to leave the service entirely. As you’ve already seen with email data, just deleting a piece of information doesn’t mean Facebook forgets it. Instead, it forms part of your file, so you have to go to www.facebook.com/help/delete_account and request a full wipe.
This will take up to 90 days to complete, but even then not everything will disappear. Anything you’ve sent to a friend, for instance, will live on until he or she deletes it. What’s more, that content will continue to fall under the Facebook licence – the agreement you signed up to that says videos and photos can be used on a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free worldwide licence agreement. Some things, it would seem, we just have to live with.
LinkedIn Data Retention?
Is that the same with LinkedIn? It seems not. The official LinkedIn policy is that your profile will be kept until you close your account. It will then start to remove information within 24 hours and de-identify logs and backup information within 30 days. But what does LinkedIn hold about you?
LinkedIn says it will keep IP access logs and other information not viewable through your profile, such as the adverts you’ve clicked, any ad targeting criteria and your login attempts, including the machine you’ve used and its IP address. LinkedIn’s privacy policy says you can request these details through its Help Center – yet the link it provides is frustratingly broken.
We finally found the information after some digging around, and it’s good news: you can request your data archive by going to www.linkedin.com/settings/data-export-page, receiving the information in two batches, the second of which will be sent 24 hours after the first. If deleting your account feels too dramatic, you can also go to LinkedIn’s new Privacy & Setting page, which lets you determine the things that can be seen about you and the information that can be used. At the very least, you may want to take a closer look at the third-party apps that can view your data.
Social media sites aren’t the only ones storing data that you may want to delete, though. Retailers such as Amazon keep information about you, and you don’t even have to be logged in to get the gist of what it knows: the items on its home page prior to sign-in are uncannily linked to your preferences. Amazon also keeps a log of your browsing history, and it makes a note of your location history if you’re buying on a mobile device. You can’t shop on Amazon if cookies are not enabled either.
To remove some of this data, you can go to the Settings, and manage your advertising preferences and you can also delete parts of your browsing history. The same is true of other retail sites, so delete accounts you don’t use or delve into the settings to see what can be removed. Altering phone numbers and addresses will disrupt information on sites that don’t have a clear deletion policy.
Around The Web
But what about the information that has been put out there about you by other people? As vain as it may sound, you should perform a search on your name in Google to see if some websites contain information about you that you would rather wasn’t there. In 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that we all had a ‘right to be forgotten’, and it has meant that you can apply to Google to have links to personal data or posts about you removed.
There’s an online removal form at goo.gl/3afoo8, which asks for the name you used to search, your full name and the URLs you want to be removed. A team at Google then assesses the request, balancing your privacy rights with the public’s interest to know and the right to distribute information.
While this doesn’t take down the information contained on the actual website, it does make it more difficult for people to find it through Google. Of course, this means you’ll need to request that links are removed on other search engines. For Bing, you need to go to goo.gl/oFXWUE and fill in a similar but more probing form, and for Yahoo, you can go to goo.gl/eU2q1y.
There are companies that will look to do all of this on your behalf if you’re willing to pay, but it’s easy enough to do it yourself. If you want content removed from the actual website, then you need to locate the web editor and request the information is removed there too. Simply look on the Contacts or About Me pages of a site, or search whois.com for the domain name to find details of the person you need to get hold of. But be warned: if the information is on a newspaper and it is factual and legal, an editor is very unlikely to take it down.
But what of the data being collected by third parties? There are lots of data brokers around, which collect data about internet users such as Spokeo (spokeo.com/uk) and CrunchBase. It’s hard to request information from each of these individually, and there’ll be a fair bit of legwork involved. You may find it’s not worth the hassle, or you may want to look for and pay for a service that will do it on your behalf. The truth is, though, that anyone using the web is powerless to do everything they can to protect their data.
Some companies make life easier. Acxiom (acxiom.co.uk) supplies businesses with marketing data that includes information taken from the internet, and it has a website called aboutthedata.com, which explains how it uses it and why it collects it. Unfortunately, it’s only available for use if you have an American address; anyone outside the US won’t be allowed to see and edit the marketing data that may have been gathered about you.
With an afternoon set aside and a bit of effort, you can regain control of the internet and what it knows about you. It’s unlikely you’ll ever be able to erase yourself entirely from the internet and go off-grid, but you can at least minimise your footprint. Don’t let the world of Big Data win, no matter how pervasive it may be.
Deleting Your Accounts
Over the years, you’ve probably set up dozens and dozens of online accounts, many of which have been abandoned or forgotten. If you want to have a spring clean, targeting these is a good start.
The website justdelete.me lists lots of web services, colour coding them to show which ones are easiest to remove and which prove rather more difficult. Begin with the greens, clicking on the information button, if one is available, to see how you go about deleting your accounts and your data.
Then spend a bit more time getting your head around the red, harder ones – so that’s Experian, which makes you call or email; Etsy, which retains your email address, and GroupOn, which makes you contact support.
It dismays us to see a good number of black entries: these are said to be impossible to delete, and they include bungie.net, high street furniture chain Dwell, and Evernote.
The site advises you to replace your details on your Dwell account with bogus information, and it bemoans the fact that you can only deactivate Evernote, which means you’ll have to manually delete your notes and personal information.
It’s worth bookmarking this website and referring to it before you open any account, assessing whether their services are really worth divulging data that they appear hellbent on hanging on to.
Using My Activity
How to get around the My Activity interface and delete the data you don’t want Google to use.
Categories
There are at-a-glance views of the categories listed each day, together with a bar that represents the number of items within each. You can see here that our items mainly relate to search, with books, images and videos as our secondary concerns.
Bundles
If you search for related websites or look at similar items, they will be grouped together in My Activity within bundles (which is why our search for information about various television shows, movies and actors is contained in this one box). A heading shows which website they relate to.
Times
Want to know what you were doing at any given time of the day? This will tell you all you need to know. It’s the most superfluous feature of My Activity, but you may find it comes in handy for something.
Details
When you click on the righthand menu within a bundle, you can select Details. It will give you the full lowdown of everything that is in that bundle, the number of which is shown at the bottom of each box.
Delete
You can delete individual entries on your My Activity page, or you can wipe away entire bundles: the choice is entirely yours. It’s also possible to delete an entire day’s worth of items by selecting the drop-down menu in the green date strips.
Stop Saving Your Activity In Google
Once you’ve deleted data from Google, you may want to consider preventing it from saving any more.
1. Go To Activity Controls
Click on the main menu at the top of the screen and select Activity controls from the drop-down menu. This will take you to the Activity Control screen.
2. Viewing Activities
You’ll see various boxes as you scroll down the screen. The first one is Web & App Activity. Note the slider in the top-right corner. Move it to off.
3. Are You Sure?
Google doesn’t particularly want you to do this. Whenever you try to turn off any of its data collection functions, it always gives a reason why you shouldn’t.
4. Location History
Keep going down the list, deciding if you want Google to log your location history, device information, voice and audio activity, YouTube search history and more.