Western Daily Press (Saturday)
It is time for a data detox
JAMES WALKER, CEO OF DATA CHAMPIONS RIGHTLY, WARNS CONSUMERS TO CLEAN UP THEIR DIGITAL ACT THIS SUMMER TO AVOID SCAMS AND FINANCIAL LOSS
AS THE cost-of-living crisis takes hold and most of us have less disposable income the last thing you need, just to rub salt into the wound, is to lose your hard-earned cash from an online scam.
It’s a fact that fraud is on the rise as criminals look to take advantage of people who are struggling with to make ends meet and looking around online for deals. But as we know, not everything is as it seems.
The reality is that increased online activity will expand your digital footprint and potentially expose you to scams and phishing – social media attacks often used to steal your financial data, are a huge threat and growing more widespread every year.
Your digital footprint is the data that’s left behind whenever you use a digital service or post information onto a digital forum, such as a social network. Everyone is likely to have a digital footprint, and this is normal. Online activities such as photo sharing, dating, banking, shopping, gaming, professional networking, and social networking all add to someone’s digital footprint.
Others can contribute to an individual’s digital footprint by posting photographs or information about them online.
According to UK Finance, criminals stole £753.9m through fraud in the first half of 2021, up 30 per cent annually.
Many of these attacks and fraud have resulted from users data being sold to data brokers without your knowledge or agreement. They are scraping your online activity and digital footprint to profile you.
Your data is being sold on the dark web to thousands of companies. Some will sell it. Others will make money from it! Lots of them will lose it or get hacked, exposing you to digital harm.
Data champions Rightly is warning consumers that now is the time to act and take care of their digital footprint. By that, they mean you should look at who holds your personal information and decide whether they really need it.
Consumers can use its free online tool, Rightly Protect, to ask companies to delete their data and limit exposure to digital harm.
It’s alarming that so many consumers have let their digital footprint grow out of control, and even more worrying is the percentage who have simply just accepted they’re a sitting duck and will eventually fall victim to a scam as a result.
Rightly is asking consumers who might have any free time this summer holiday to take a moment to clean up their digital footprint and carry out some additional safety checks to avoid financial loss.
Last year there were six billion breaches of consumer data around the world and every minute consumers in the UK lose more than £4,000 to scammers.
The two are linked. Your data powers scams, it’s fuel to the scams’ fire. Your data is used for identity fraud scams, spear-phishing attacks, and hacks where your password is compromised.
Here are five simple things you can do to clean up your digital footprint and reduce your exposure to scams and fraud.
Detox your data 1 – delete or deactivate your shopping, social media, and web service accounts
Do an audit of the accounts or profiles that you have created online.
Most people will have created many accounts over time – for gaming, online shopping, socialising or even just out of curiosity.
These are easy to forget but important to manage. Think about which networks you have social media profiles on. Aside from the obvious (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn), do you still have old accounts on sites like Hotmail? MySpace?
Which shopping sites have you registered on? To get rid of these accounts, go to your account settings and look for an option to either deactivate, remove, or close your account. Depending on the account, you may find it under Privacy or Security, or something similar.
If you have forgotten your username, search through your email inboxes to find emails from the websites. Most large websites will have a process you can follow to retrieve your account details.
Then create a second email account that you use when shopping online, registering for online services, and all those other unnecessary boxes.
Detox your data 2 – manage your Google settings
Take control of your Google search results. It’s now time to decide how easily you would like people to find your information. If you want to remain private, then ensure that your security and privacy settings are up to date on your profiles.
Detox your data 3 – Remove yourself from data collection sites
Data brokers collect data from everything you do online and then sell it to interested parties, more specifically advertise to you, and sell stuff.
To help you do this Rightly has launched a simple and free tool. It enables you to ask data brokers what information they hold on you and then helps you delete this information, reducing the risk of data harm and exposure to scams, fraud, data breaches and spearfishing.
The new tool can be found at: rightly.co.uk/request-your-data/ how-can-i-get-my-data-fromdata-brokers/
Detox your data 4 – check to see if your email has been compromised and your data breached
A Google search isn’t going to tell if your usernames and passwords have been hacked.
Make a habit of checking if any of your information has been breached.
You can do this for free at haveibeenpwned.com, which checks your email against databases on the dark web. You can then change key information and passwords to prevent being hacked or scammed.
Again, use Google search to find out where your data is being used and stay one step ahead. ‘Forewarned is forearmed’
■ Search: [Firstname.surname@] and you’ll see if you can find email addresses attached to you
■ Look for: [Firstname. surname:doc] to see if you can find any Word documents that contain your name. You could also swap out the file extension with other popular file types such as jpg, xls, pdf, etc.
■ If you search: [:FirstName.surname] you’ll see results showing your name anywhere in the text
Detox your data 5 – opt-out
You should opt out of marketing communications with any company you don’t want to hear from. Plus, remove yourself from as many databases as possible that store your contact details and personal information. For example, The Direct Marketing Association, the Telephone Preference Service, and the Mail Preference Services all allow you to opt-out of communications and to remove yourself from marketing databases.
But you can also use your rights under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to remove your data from as many companies as you’d like, for free.
This is because the law states that a company must erase your information if you ask them to. You can do this yourself by emailing each company individually, or you can send the same subject access request to multiple companies via Rightly’s free service: right.ly/request-your-data/ subject-access/
My final words are: join the data rebellion now and take preventative measures to stop your data ending up on the dark web. Data apathy is dangerous and costly.
Taking an interest in where your data is being used doesn’t have to be laborious or difficult.
Many people think that simply unsubscribing from emails is enough, but that doesn’t delete your data, it’s still held by companies. So, if they get hacked, your data can still be stolen. And if stolen, scammers typically have personal data for 224 days before the company even knows it’s been breached!
The only effective way to prevent scams is to take back control of your data, which the Rightly Protect service can do by making data deletion requests to a whole range of companies in one go. On a larger scale, there needs to be greater attention from government to do more to protect our data privacy.
Join the data rebellion now and take preventative measures to stop your data from ending up on the dark web? Data apathy is dangerous and costly
Rightly CEO, James Walker