by Nick Yip

Created on: July 20, 2010

The handling of your personal information can whip up a lot of unwanted situations. Try searching your name on a search engine - browse a few pages and you're likely to find something involving you. Protecting your online identity can be a real hassle, but both the safety of your public and private life is priceless. Hiding and cleaning up your information can be very important as to not reveal information who don't know much about you. There are many different ways you can protect your online identity, both by changing yourself and others' behaviour. 

A few ways to help clean up your online identity:

Delete - Noticed there's something you've found online which you don't want to be seen? The best choice is to delete it, as most other choices will publicize your information. Sometimes it's just best to delete and posts/text which you find that somebody else might have put up. This choice is essential for those who want to complete conceal it, remove it from online databases and scrap text completely.

Google, Yahoo and MSN - Search engines have bugs which will always be ready to crawl the website you just published. Brilliant.... not always. These crawlers will also pick up any sites with new publishes information - particularly those with blogs or forums. If you want less people to look at it, however you still want your information online, you can always add more detail to narrow down the information of people's search results hitting your page. On the other hand, there's always that nifty delete button if you need that extra security.

Other people's posts - Sites such as Myspace or Facebook can be a major problem of this. Search engines can easily pick up people's profiles on such, and searchers can easily view these. In such cases, you can't be scared to ask the poster to remove the post. If they cannot or do not want to, your best chances lie with the administrators, who will be able to handle your situation in a nice, gentle way.

Use safe billing sites - Online billing can be a pain. Nobody wants to fall for scams, yet they still do. The best way to avoid this is to switch your billing information to a site like Paypal, or create a new account with them. Paypal conceals your information only to administrators, and require little information when sending funds.

There are many more ways to clean up your online identity - these are just a few. The internet can heavily affect your social life, and requires cautious and safe browsing as well as the independence of managing your details. 

 

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