All Right Then, Keep Your Secrets: How to Reclaim Your Digital Footprint

Have you ever Googled your name? Or asked ChatGPT to find information about a person by providing their name? If you have, you’ve probably realised just how much of our personal information is floating around the internet without us even knowing. I know I did, and the results of ChatGPT’s scavenger hunt scared me into not sharing it with you, as I value my own privacy.

That’s the core problem with today’s internet: vast amounts of personal data are collected, stored, and traded long before most of us realise it’s happening.

What makes the situation worse are so-called data brokers, which are companies that collect immense amounts of personal information (full names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, educational achievements, social media profiles, and other publicly available information), create detailed profiles, and then sell them for a massive profit to other businesses for marketing, risk assessments, or other purposes. 

In countries like the United States, this industry operates largely out of public view, and the worst-case scenario is a devastating data breach that leaves people vulnerable to hackers, scammers, and other bad actors.

Has Your Data Been Leaked?

Over the years, there have been countless data breaches that affected millions of people. Each of us has probably fallen victim to a data breach, with our names, emails, and phone numbers ending up on some dingy websites for all the bad guys to exploit. However, some are worse than others.

In 2024, hackers exposed more than 2.9 billion (yes, with a “b”) records of personal information for people in the United States, including their names, social security numbers, all known physical addresses, and possible aliases. The alleged culprit? National Public Data, a company that stores and sells people’s data for use in background checks, to obtain criminal records, and for private investigators.

What stood out to me wasn’t just the scale of the breach (which is simply horrifying), but how quietly such companies operate until something goes wrong.

If you think you’re lucky enough to have dodged the previous data breach, your chances won’t be so good when it comes to social media breaches. You have a Twitter account, right? 

Well, according to Reuters, in 2018, Twitter Inc. asked over 330 million of its users to change their account passwords ASAP as they’ve discovered a glitch that may have caused some personal information to be stored in normally readable text on its internal systems instead of how it’s usually disguised by a method known as "hashing". Even companies with vast security budgets aren’t immune to basic failures.

What Do They Know About You?

Have you ever considered how much of your personal information is collected online? TikTok, the most popular social media app, collects a scary amount of your personal information: your name, age, username, password, language, email, phone number, social media account information, and profile image, the content you create on the app, information from the messages you write, your purchase information (including payment card numbers), as well as your location, your IP address, mobile carrier, time zone settings, your device model, the device system, network type, your screen resolution and operating system, app and file names and types, keystroke patterns or rhythms, battery state, audio settings and connected audio devices. 

I don’t know about you, but reading through its data policies made me seriously question whether the entertainment value is worth the trade-off.

Meta apps like Facebook are also notorious for collecting as much of your personal information as possible. When you use these, you’re handing over information, including your name, email address, age, phone number, who your friends or followers are, content you create and comments you write, the content from and data about the messages you send or receive, the content you provide through your camera roll settings (essentially, your entire phone photo gallery unless you specify otherwise), the ads you see and how you interact with them, data on any purchases you make (including your credit card information), the device or software you use, what you’re doing on that device, your location, information about your network and IP address, information collected from cookies, purchases you make off of Meta apps using non-Meta checkouts (yes, this means Meta knows what you buy when you click on a Facebook ad), hashtags you use, and how much time you spend on Meta apps. 

If you sync your address book to Facebook, Meta also collects the names, email addresses, or phone numbers of your contacts; I don’t want my grandma’s personal information out there, do you? So what can you do about this?

Reducing Your Digital Footprint

There are many data removal services out there, including Incogni, DeleteMe, and Aura Identity Theft, that make money by deleting your personal information from the World Wide Web. But let’s be honest, most of you (including myself) probably just won’t get around to doing it, no matter how many YouTube videos are sponsored by these companies. 

A 2025 study conducted by Security.org asked 1,000 Americans about their digital footprint, and nearly 85% of them reported that they’re at least moderately concerned about who has access to their data. Reasonable, right? Well, only 6% of the respondents (adults in the U.S.) said that they’ve used data removal services to scrub their personal information from the internet. Less than half of the people surveyed even knew such services existed. That gap between concern and action says a lot about how overwhelming digital privacy has become.

If you’re not going to pay money to delete any of your previous digital footprint, it’s still a good idea to consciously not overshare on the internet. From making your social media profiles private and reviewing the privacy settings of the services you use to encrypting your internet connection with a VPN, and reconsidering joining any more mailing lists (that 5% discount on new shoes just isn’t worth it, long-term), protecting your personal information online is your responsibility. They benefit from collecting as much data as possible – it’s unrealistic to expect them to prioritise your privacy for you.

As the world we live in becomes more and more digital, it’s nearly impossible to remove personal information about you from the web. Still, at the end of the day, it’s up to you to protect yourself and your personal information from falling into the wrong hands. Your data has value – even when it feels mundane – and once it’s out there, you no longer control how it’s used.