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According to a recent report, we create around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. We didn’t even know ‘quintillion’ is a number – that’s how mind-boggling the statistic is! The average person, of course, spends around six hours and thirty minutes online daily. And while you might not think that you spend that much time browsing the internet, any time you spend online is going to have an effect.
Your Digital Presence
The reason using a data removal tool has become more commonplace in 2024 is because everything you interact with when you’re online interacts back with you. That is to say, your movements are being monitored, understood, assimilated, and processed, even if you have a sweeping glance at a single website. This is because every website, or link, or profile that you visit wants to know exactly who is visiting them and how they can market themselves to you.
In order to do this, they have to create a profile of their users. How old are you? What’s your gender? What are your interests, your behaviours, your inclinations? How likely are you to purchase something from them, and if you’re not very likely, how can they market themselves to increase their chances? All of this data is then stored by the company, and if worse comes to worse, it is sold to the next highest bidder.
As well as this, there are these entities called data brokers. These brokers exist nearly everywhere on the web, and their sole purpose is to collect your data – without you knowing it – create a profile of you, and then sell it on for profit. If, for whatever reason, you don’t think this is such a big deal, just look at the market size of the industry itself.
As of 2024, the global data broker market is estimated at around $389.765 billion, and this is only expected to grow at a CAGR of 7.58% in the next five years, eventually reaching $561.538 by 2029. So what can be done? Well, in a digital world where ‘big data’ is prioritized above all else, if you want something done, you have to do it yourself.
Guide to Removing Your Digital Footprint
The first thing to understand is that you’re never going to be able to manually remove your personal information from the internet. The total amount of data online is estimated to be around 44 zettabytes, and its capacity is theoretically limitless, so finding exactly where your data is and how it’s being used is going to be an impossible task when done solo.
This is why the essential data removal tools that we mentioned earlier are becoming so frequent. Through tools like Incogni, data removal can take place in the background to constantly protect your privacy, costing only around $0.04 per data broker and with a huge range of data brokers to remove information from. Along with this, you get a dashboard to track your online information removal progress, and weekly reports to keep you up to date with what your digital presence looks like.
In line with this, you can begin being proactive with your digital footprints. For any subscriptions, social media accounts or messaging apps that you don’t use anymore, you can deactivate your account and only have a single source of online social output. You can also clear your browsing history regularly, removing cookies and cache from every browser that you use, while ensuring that you have robust privacy settings for the browser you do use – and perhaps encrypted communication and VPNs to enhance security. Speaking of browsers, there are also several online browsers that push data privacy as their main USP. These include Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and Brave, all of which have built in tools for privacy management and proactively work to protect your data from trackers and third-party cookies By following all of these steps, you can make sure to reclaim control of your data and wipe away your profile from the digital space.
