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Reducing your digital footprint
Reducing your digital footprint is helpful if you're trying to do a comprehensive personal security inventory, because it can be pretty overwhelming how much data is out there about us. If we want to be in control of our data (inasmuch as we can be!), more data means more data management. To scale down this problem, we have a few recommended approaches:
Are there services you no longer use, but are just sitting out there on the internet, as treasure troves of your personal history? Accounts like these can expose things like your family relationships, your birthday, or even personal facts that might be used in account security questions like what schools you went to. Deleting them reduces the risk that this data could in some way be used against you. If there is some reason to retain the account, at least try to reduce the amount of data it exposes to the public.
In some cases, closing unused accounts is a no-brainer, but sometimes there may be a lot of memories tied up with an old platform that make it hard to throw away. One option that can sometimes help is to export the data before deleting an account, so you can browse it later and reminisce about youthful blogging or old photos.
For services that you're still using or can't bear to delete, another way to reduce your data footprint is to make accounts private. Many social media services offer a "friends only" privacy level, and some even offer a "only me" level of privacy, which can be helpful if you just want to keep an account around for nostalgia.
Another important part of our digital footprint is the dark underbelly of data brokers and "anonymized" usage data available on the internet for advertisers, private investigators, debt collectors, and general sleazeballs. It's often a mystery where this data comes from, though people have tried to figure it out. One of the reasons there is such an enormous ecosystem of personal data available on the internet is because almost every service you use will collect data about you, and many will share or resell it. In most cases, there is a way to opt out of some or all of this data collection. It's a never-ending, obnoxious process, but in the long term it may help to reduce your digital footprint.
- Export: instalooter is a GUI based tool that will download all of your instagram photos.