There is no such thing as Internet privacy!  And there is no escaping the fact that the Internet knows more about you than you’d like. Your life is an open book. When someone Googles your name they can find out much more about you than you’d want. But Google doesn’t tap into the extensive world of personal information that exists just out of reach of search engines. Detailed information about your personal life resides in databases maintained by the government, corporations and publications—and it is all publicly accessible.

Everything is out there on the Web for anyone to see—from the price you paid for your apartment or house to your political leanings. Companies known as “data brokers” collect all this information and package it for sale. These companies compile your personal information into a report and sell it in the form of a background check. But you also have the same access to public information that the data brokers have, and you should run a background check on yourself to see what someone else can find out about you.

Although you can’t control the information about yourself that is part of the public record, you can make it harder for someone to gather it. The Web privacy site Safe Shepherd gives some suggestions of ways to opt out of listings. For a fee they will scrub your data from the sites and then monitor the Web for any additional mentions of your personal information.

There are also Web browsing services like Anonymizer that allow you to surf without leaving a footprint. And to keep websites from collecting information about you as you move from one website to another, you can install the free browser plugin Ghostery. That will stymie online snoops who want to know where you go and what you buy.

 

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