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Remember to Forget

·4 mins
Table of Contents

In an era where companies eagerly collect your private data—sometimes transparently, sometimes not—protecting your digital privacy has become increasingly challenging. While governments often facilitate rather than prevent this data collection, there are still meaningful steps we can take to maintain some control over our personal information.

Though achieving complete privacy without disconnecting entirely from modern society is nearly impossible, implementing strategic privacy practices can significantly reduce your digital footprint.

The Right to Be Forgotten #

One powerful approach is leveraging data deletion rights established by regulations like the GDPR (European Union) and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act). These frameworks grant consumers the right to request their data be deleted.

While these regulations aren’t perfect, they provide legal mechanisms that companies must honor. Many organizations apply these standards globally rather than creating different systems for different regions, meaning you can benefit from these protections regardless of where you live.

Communication Privacy #

  • Message Auto-Deletion: Configure your messaging apps (like iMessage on iOS/macOS) to automatically delete messages after 30 days. This reduces vulnerability if your device is ever compromised or subject to legal discovery.

  • Secure Messaging: Adopt end-to-end encrypted services with minimal data retention. Signal provides robust encryption with disappearing messages, while Matrix/Element offers self-hosting options for group chats. These alternatives give you greater control than mainstream corporate platforms.

  • Email Protection: Consider privacy-focused email services like Fastmail with your own domain. Generate unique masked email addresses for different services to prevent cross-site tracking and reduce unwanted communications.

  • Phone Number Protection: Limit sharing your phone number whenever possible. This identifier is particularly valuable for tracking and correlating your activities across different services. When validation isn’t required, consider using alternative options.

Account Security and Management #

  • Strong Authentication: Replace SMS-based two-factor authentication with more secure methods like hardware security keys (such as YubiKey) or authenticator app-based one-time passwords. SMS authentication is vulnerable to SIM swapping attacks.

  • Password Management: Employ a password manager such as 1Password to create and store unique, complex passwords for each service you use, enhancing your security without the burden of memorization.

  • Account Hygiene: Regularly audit and delete inactive accounts. Many services provide account deletion tools that can completely purge your data. Companies often honor deletion requests claiming California or EU residency without rigorous verification.

Browsing and Online Activity #

  • Browser Choice: Select privacy-focused browsers like Firefox, enhanced with extensions such as uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and HTTPS Everywhere. On iOS, despite WebKit limitations, options like Firefox Focus or Brave offer stronger privacy protections than standard Safari.

  • Search Engines: Explore privacy-respecting alternatives to Google such as DuckDuckGo or Startpage. If you must use Google search, do so without signing in to minimize tracking.

  • Ad Company Avoidance: Be cautious with products from advertising-driven companies like Google, Facebook, and Meta, whose business models depend on extensive user profiling.

  • Social Media Strategy: Consider limiting use of advertising-supported social platforms. When necessary, access them through specialized browsers, containers, or sandboxed environments to restrict tracking capabilities.

Financial Privacy #

  • Credit Freezes: Implement credit freezes with major bureaus to prevent unauthorized access to your credit information. Key agencies to consider include:

    • Equifax (separate freezes needed for standard credit and their “Work Number” employment verification service)
    • TransUnion
    • Experian
    • Accurate
    • ChexSystems (banking activity reporting)
    • LexisNexis (insurance and risk assessment information)

    For a comprehensive list, see the CFPB’s consumer reporting companies guide.

  • Loyalty Program Assessment: Evaluate the privacy tradeoffs of loyalty programs, which primarily exist to track purchasing patterns and influence consumer behavior through targeted marketing and artificial urgency.

  • Retail Data Protection: Decline requests for personal information during retail transactions. Despite “discount” incentives, this data primarily serves marketing and profiling purposes. A simple refusal is usually sufficient.

Data Minimization Strategy #

Data minimization—limiting the information stored about you—is a fundamental privacy principle. Consider these practices:

  • Regular Deletion: Schedule periodic reviews to clean up data from services you use, including email, cloud storage, and social platforms.

  • Data Exports: Before deleting accounts, download any important information. Most services provide data export options in their settings.

  • Thoughtful Sharing: Exercise discretion about what you share online, even in seemingly private contexts. Assume any digital information could potentially become public.

  • Privacy-Focused Alternatives: When possible, choose services designed with privacy in mind, such as ProtonMail instead of Gmail or Firefox instead of Chrome.

While this list isn’t exhaustive, it provides a foundation for improving your digital privacy. As consumers, our control over interactions with corporations is limited, but understanding what information is legally required versus optional empowers you to decline unnecessary data collection. Remember that providing false information isn’t illegal in most contexts, with specific exceptions like banking (due to regulations like the Patriot Act, which—despite its name—focuses more on surveillance than security).

Perfect privacy in today’s digital landscape is unattainable, but the goal is reducing your data exposure to a reasonable level while maintaining normal digital participation. Each privacy-enhancing step incrementally improves your situation—and sometimes, being slightly more difficult to track than the average person provides meaningful protection against casual surveillance and data harvesting.