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Again, that's longangle.com. Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. If you're new here, I'm your host, Chris Hutchins. And usually on the show, I'm sitting down with the world's best experts to learn the strategies, tactics, and frameworks they use to improve and optimize their lives.

That means optimizing travel, think flights, hotels, points, and miles, your money, think savings, investing, getting deals, as well as life and work, think happiness, leadership, relationships, negotiation, and so much more. And in my last episode, I talked with Adam Levin about cybersecurity, identity theft, fraud, and a lot more.

Well, that episode sent me down a serious rabbit hole of research about everything I can be doing to protect myself and my family online, so I thought it'd be helpful to share everything I learned so you know what you might want to do yourself. We're going to cover protecting everything from your devices, your identity, to your online accounts, your credit, and trying to remove all your personal data online.

An incredible amount of time went into this episode, so I'd really love to know if it's valuable to you, and if so, it would mean the world to me if you shared it with your friends, your family, maybe your parents, and anyone else you think would benefit from listening.

Thank you so much in advance for doing that, and let's get started with protecting your devices. So simple, quick thing is making sure that you have encryption turned on on your computer. If it's a Mac, you turn on FileVault. It's simple. If it's Windows, you can go into device encryption and enable that.

The reason I think this is so important is if someone has access to your computer, you're able to get access to what's on your hard drive if it's not encrypted. You might think, "Oh, they can't log into Windows, they can't log into your computer," but if they have your physical hard drive, get your information.

So definitely turn on encryption. Also, I just got an email from a listener named Randy who suggested if you want to create a secure FileVault on your computer for sensitive documents, check out VeriCrypt, but you can also use disk images on Mac to create a secure disk as well.

He also suggested that if you're looking to store stuff in the cloud, despite that they're supposed to be secure, you might want to go a little bit further. He suggested checking out Cryptomator or BoxCryptor as two ways that you can store stuff securely in the cloud. So thanks, Randy, for those suggestions.

Now, on your phone, I would recommend setting up a PIN or a password to unlock the device, and I would set your phone to automatically erase after a certain number of failed attempts. You can also set an option in iOS to not connect to USB devices while the phone's locked, and you can also turn off what notifications show up when your phone's locked.

Another thing that I want to talk about is your data when you're on your device. So I've got a question actually about VPNs and browsing online and when it's safe and using public Wi-Fi. So there's really two things that I recommend here. So one is the DNS servers that you use, which is when you type into Google.com, a DNS server will translate that to where you're actually trying to go.

And by default, your computer's probably using the DNS server from your ISP, your Comcast, your Verizon, whoever's providing your internet service. I don't love the idea of letting those services see where all my traffic's going because they're notorious for selling that anonymized data. But I mostly don't like that it's slow.

And so I recommend CloudFlare is my preferred DNS. If you search CloudFlare 1.1.1.1, you can go figure it out and set it up. They have an iOS app that lets you set that up also. So I think it's a great option. But the question of VPNs also comes up.

So most traffic nowadays is all happening over HTTPS, which means it's secure and encrypted. So if you're in a coffee shop and you log into your bank, I don't think you need to worry about someone else there or the cafe owner or their ISP getting your banking credentials and logging into your account.

That I wouldn't worry about. However, they will know what sites you browse. So if you're concerned with privacy and you don't want whoever's operating the cafe or your ISP knowing where you're going on the Internet, what sites you're visiting, they won't be able to see your logins, they won't be able to see what you're doing on the sites, but they will see what you're accessing.

If that's important to you, you can absolutely use a VPN when you're not at home. But I will say I don't think you need to worry about the VPN for the purpose of someone getting access to your logins. I would say when traveling internationally, there's two other reasons to use a VPN.

One, there are a lot of countries whose data collection and privacy rules are not nearly what they are in the US. And by the way, the US is not at the top either. So if you were in China, if you were in other states where you're worried about that, you can use a VPN to encrypt everything you're doing.

You can also use a VPN to connect back to whatever country you're from and maybe be able to access things like Netflix when you're online in another country. I've heard a lot of good recommendations from others using Cloudflare has a service called Warp, which helps protect all of your traffic.

It doesn't let you do the specify a new location. I've had a lot of people recommend ExpressVPN for that service as well. And then finally, in your browser, if you want to prevent ads from being able to see who you are, you can use extensions like uBlock Origin and other ad blockers in Chrome.

If you're on an iPhone and you pay for iCloud Plus, Safari has, I think it's called Private Relay, which will also provide some protection browsing online. And I think they add the same thing to the mail app. So that's another option for iOS users. So that's kind of device.

But let's talk about logins. Hopefully from the earlier episode and plenty of other episodes, you're all using password managers. My personal favorite is 1Password, allthehacks.com/1password. If you haven't checked it out, I will call out that 1Password is a cloud hosted password manager. That means your credentials, while stored and encrypted with 1Password on their servers, they don't actually have access to your logins because they don't have your master password, but they are stored in the cloud.

So there are other options if you want to self-host your own password manager files on your devices. For me, I think the convenience is worth using something in the cloud, but totally understand why you might want to hold them locally. So I use 1Password to go into all of my logins out there, and I want to really make sure that I have a different password for every single site.

But there are a few other things I think you can do beyond just that. So one is using secondary emails. So when someone's trying to, let's say, hack into your Gmail or hack into your bank account, most likely the email address they're going to try to use is the email address that is found all over the internet for you, your most common email address.

But you can go create a secondary email, either on a per login basis or just one you use for all your important logins. You can use the plus feature on Gmail. So if your email address is John Doe at Gmail, you can say John Doe plus Twitter at Gmail, and it'll always get rerouted to your Gmail, but the email address will be different.

And someone who knows John Doe at Gmail might not know what you put in after the plus sign, and Twitter will know that you have to have the plus sign because that's your email login. Your email at Twitter wouldn't be John Doe at, it would be John Doe plus Twitter.

And so you have to know that. So there's a couple options there for how you can set that up for usernames. I would also recommend not just using your name, maybe use something that's a little different, and maybe even do something slightly different for each site so that your username isn't obvious.

This is all to help prevent people from taking your username or your email address and trying to reset your password. You can also do a couple other things. So I definitely recommend changing your mother's maiden name. It's too easy to find that kind of information online. So you can just put any other phrase, word, combination of letters in there.

For a lot of services like banks or your cell phone provider, you can call up and usually request that they add some increased security to your account. I would do that. And then last, if you have those security questions, that's like, "What street did you grow up?" Or, "Who is your high school teacher?" Or, "What's your paternal grandmother's first name?" You can always just make up an answer.

The answer does not have to be the true answer. And if you use a password manager, you could store those security questions there if you want. You can store them somewhere else. There are a lot of options for where you can put them. When it comes to two-factor authentication, given how easy it is for someone to hijack your phone number, whether that's through SIM swapping or a good friend of mine had this happen to him recently, someone was able to call AT&T and convince them to turn on call forwarding.

So they didn't actually take his SIM card. They didn't actually redirect anything. His phone still worked. But for a few days, he didn't realize that every time someone called his phone, it got redirected to someone else, which meant they were able to go to sites online and say, "Don't text me the code, but call me with the code." And this other random person was able to get those calls rerouted to them.

So, if it's possible, I would recommend turning off SMS authentication everywhere and using an authentication app, like a time-based one-time password, those six digit codes that refresh, you can put them in the Google Authenticator app. I'm going to get to other places to put them, but if you have to use SMS, I would say it would be ideal if you used a number that's not your primary phone number.

So you could set up a free Google voice number. If you have a Google voice number and you've been giving it out freely over the past few years, you can always just change that Google voice number for free and move your two-factor authentication codes where you have to have SMS to Google voice.

Obviously, if you can turn off SMS, even better. Security keys. I recently bought a YubiKey 5C NFC, which lets you use USB-C and NFC, so you can tap the back of your phone and you don't have to actually plug it in. YubiKey has a bunch of other options. I'm recently a very big fan of security keys because you have to physically have the key with you, so you can have set up backups and have multiple keys in case you lose them.

Obviously, the downside is if you didn't bring your key and you need to log in, it's very difficult to do that. There are some backup codes that you can set up, but for the most part, you need your key. So it might be too much for some people, but I really like that added security.

As for authenticator codes, you can put them in the authenticator app. You can also put them in 1Password, which was something that I was doing, but realized that by having my authenticator codes in 1Password, I was not necessarily having two-factor authentication. I wouldn't say it might not be perfect two-factor authentication to store your authenticator codes in your 1Password because your Gmail password might also be in there.

However, if someone were to compromise your Gmail password or your Facebook password, but not your 1Password login, then you would actually have some protection because they would need both your Gmail password and your 1Password login to be able to get in. And if you have 1Password secured with a security key, you're making 1Password two-factor authenticated.

So you can have a little bit of protection putting your OTP codes into 1Password. And I think the convenience of on mobile and web being able to copy and paste your two-factor codes from 1Password directly in and autofill them is certainly a convenience. But for people who really want true two-factor auth, you can use a service like Google Authenticator or OTP Auth is another app and store those locally.

You can use the Authy app as well, which actually stores those codes in the cloud so you can transfer them between devices, but they're in at least a different service than 1Password. So I haven't experimented yet with Yubikey's ability to store one-time passwords on your security key, which would be a different place to store them than OTP Auth or the app.

But it's something that I might play around with in the future. And finally, once you have a security key set up, you're now eligible for Google's advanced protection program, which is awesome. So that just adds an increased layer of security to your Gmail account, which is something that if this is important to you, I would definitely take a look at.

It does add a couple restrictions for authenticating third-party services to your Gmail, to your Google Drive and that kind of stuff. It disables app passwords, but it does add a lot more security. So if that's important to you, then I would definitely check out Google Advanced Protection. But you do need two security keys, a primary and a backup to be able to turn that on.

Finally, if you're going through all these Gmail settings, I do recommend that you look at all the services that you've authed, and this is true on Google, on Facebook, on Twitter, to go in and see, is there an app that I authenticated to my Gmail five years ago that I gave all of these permissions to?

And so I would definitely go check out what you've authenticated to all of your services and potentially delete a lot of them or even refresh them, because sometimes you've set them up so long ago that there weren't as many options. There might have just been auth Twitter or auth Google.

Now there might be more options like allow this thing to only read my Drive files, but not make changes to or delete things. So I definitely would go do that. I want to tell you all about the most amazing way to buy a second home, and I know because we actually bought one for one eighth the cost.

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I use Credit Karma, which is also free to get alerts. Chase also has a free identity monitoring product called Chase Credit Journey, which is worth looking into. Also, if you've ever been part of a security breach, the company that was breached usually offers a free premium credit monitoring service for at least one year, so that could be an option as well.

For me so far, I think those alerts work. I don't pay for an extra service. However, I do think it makes a lot of sense for people to freeze their credit. So you can go into Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion and go freeze your credit. And that means that anytime someone is trying to open up a new credit card, open up a new loan for an automobile or a mortgage or anything, you have to unfreeze your credit to do that.

So I definitely think freezing your credit makes sense. Even I, who like opening up new cards and getting signup bonuses, it's not hard to go in, temporarily lift that freeze, apply, and then refreeze those accounts. Or if it's temporary, you set it to automatically reinstate the freeze. I did look into credit fraud alerts, which you can set up for one year easily or a longer period of time, I think if you're in the military or if you have been a victim of identity theft, but if you're going to go ahead and freeze your credit, everything I've read is that it's a little bit redundant because fraud alerts will kind of tell the financial institutions to take a little bit of extra precaution when opening up an account.

But if your credit's frozen, then they won't open it up at all. So I don't know if fraud alerts make sense if you're willing to freeze your credit, but if for some reason you don't want to freeze your credit, I would definitely look at setting up fraud alerts. I actually, in the process of doing research here, was recommended to freeze my credit on two new credit bureaus that I never even really knew existed.

One is ChexSystems and one is Inovus. The three that everyone should be having their stuff frozen on are Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion, but I didn't know about those other two. I'll put some links in the show notes for everything I'm talking about here. So it's going to be a really detailed show notes, or if you go to allthehacks.com/78, which is this episode, you'll get a link to everything I'm talking about, lots of details there.

So I froze my credit on those two new credit bureaus because I didn't know I should, and I'm glad I did. One thing you can do when it comes to your credit is there's a website, optoutprescreen.com, which lets you opt out of all of the mail you get with different offers for new credit cards.

And I was so tempted to do it because we get so many credit card offers at home, but I would say one in a thousand of them is for an offer that is sometimes better than all the other offers. So I remember one time, I think I got an Amex Platinum 150,000 point signup bonus in the mail that you could only get if you got the letter in the mail.

So for me, I'm willing to deal with a bunch of junk mail about credit card offers on the off chance I get one. But if you'd rather just get rid of them, optoutprescreen.com is a good option. And finally, I talked about reviewing all the services you've offed to Google and Facebook and Twitter, but lately in the last few years, financial institutions have been adopting something called open banking.

So if you've ever used Mint or a bunch of other products online to aggregate your financial data, it used to be that you would go in and type in your Chase login and password, and they would just go crawl the data from your Chase account and aggregate it in one place.

Recently, a lot of the banks have adopted a similar authentication service called open banking, where they redirect you to Chase's site, you log into your Chase account and you approve sharing your information with Mint or like Expensify does it for expense reporting. So given that, I would encourage everyone to go look on Chase or Capital One or any other banks that you have an account at, Wells Fargo, et cetera, and go look in your settings to see who you're sharing your data with, because you might be sharing your bank data with an app you downloaded to, you know, explore your money, deleted the app, but forgot that you're still sharing your data with them.

So that's another one when it comes to your money and things to do there. When it comes to just your general identity, I already mentioned making sure you ask for increased security from a lot of your services like banks and cell phones, but I would also go to have I been pawned pwnd.com and I'll link to that in the show notes and just set up alerts.

This is a site that tracks all of the breaches from different companies who have their databases breached online and expose, unfortunately, your email address, your information, your logins, your passwords, your phone numbers. This will show you on a one-time basis, all of the breaches you've been a part of and what email addresses were leaked there.

So great thing to go look at. Or if you use one password, they have a feature called Watchtower, which does this for you already, and will highlight all the logins you have that have been found in breaches, but you can also set up alerts on your email and your phone number for new breaches.

So if they find your information in a new breach, they'll let you know. So that's identity theft. I want to talk about personal data because this is where I spent an incredibly large amount of time over the last few weeks. So in the episode I did with Adam Levin, he talked about how there's all these data brokers that collect your data.

I was blown away at how many there were. And if you go online and search for your name and, you know, maybe your street number and street name in quotes, or search for your phone number in quotes, or even search your name and the city you live in on Google or Bing or anywhere, there are so many websites, hundreds I found that have my personal data of my address and my phone number and all this stuff, family members.

And so I wanted to figure out what to do here. So I went first and said, you know what? I want to learn about this. I'm going to go do it all myself. And there's actually a really great list of all of the data brokers out there on GitHub, and I'll link to that in the show notes.

And if you want, you can manually go through all of them and you can request them, remove your data. Some of them, it's really simple. You just give them your email address and remove it. Some of them you fill out a Google form and who knows how long it will take.

Some of them you have to upload your driver's license. Some of them you have to send an email and, and some of them make it even harder than all of those things. And you, maybe you have to send them a letter. And so fortunately there are states that are adopting new laws.

And so in California, we have the CCPA, which makes companies and data brokers need to comply with your requests to delete their data. And so if you're in California, there are some sites that's like, is this a CCPA request, which may take longer, but is possible online or is it not?

And then maybe you have to mail something in. Also, when it comes to removing data, Google has this blog post I'll link to about some new options for removing your data online and from search. And then there's also these marketing sites, Axiom and LexisNexis, where there's personal data there in like marketing databases, and you can request those be removed.

But I went through this process and I was like, God, I spent. Dozens of hours trying to delete my information. And I felt like I was just, it was cat and mouse and I would delete a bunch and then I would look and there was still a few more.

And so I asked a handful of people I know, one of whom is actually the person who shared a lot of the info in here, because he's very meticulous with privacy and security and protecting himself. I'm not going to name him, but thank you so much. If you listen for helping me with this episode.

And, you know, he suggested I check out a service called delete me and I did. And I was like, Oh, wow, here's a company that's just going to do all of this for you. And so I actually first checked it out, signed up for it and looked and ran a process to delete myself.

And even though I thought I had gotten through all the information online for myself, they still found a handful of sites with my personal info. So after that, I was like, wow, I spent easily 15, 20 hours deleting my own data. And then I went through this process with them and they found yet more for around a hundred dollars.

I could have had someone do all this, save me dozens of hours. And then they'll continually check on an ongoing basis to find more data because it turns out that data just keeps popping up. And actually I reached out to them and said, Hey, I really like your product.

Can we talk about it? So I got connected with their CEO and then I actually asked them if there was something we could do together. And they offered a 20% discount and became a partner of the show. So I first heard about their product. I then use their product and then reached out to them.

So if you go to all the hacks.com/delete me, you get 20% off and so far I'm very happy with the product. And if you have requests for things that they don't search for, they focus on personal information on data brokers, but there are a couple other requests I'll talk about that they have a service where you can ask one of their advisors to help remove other things.

So if there's other stuff you find online, maybe it's related to real estate or financial transactions or something, you can actually ask them to help and remove that as well. So I'm actually going to bring on Rob from delete me for a minute right now, because I had some questions that I just couldn't get the answer to.

And I thought it'd be great to have him on for a little bit to just talk a little bit more about where this data comes from. Rob, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So as people listening know, I've gone through a lot of the process of trying to really take what I learned in the last episode and put it into action.

And the one that really took way more time than I expected was trying to delete myself off the internet. And I had found your service and I thought, Hmm, do I want to try this myself? Do I not? I went through the process of trying it myself and then ultimately ended up using you guys as well and found stuff that I didn't even find.

But I just want to start and understand this problem. How is everybody getting all this data about people on the internet that we need to go find and delete? Yeah. I mean, what's happened over the last decade or 15 years or so is that the data that we've all been sharing in our daily activities when we're going online.

And last time I checked, we spent a lot more time online today than we did 10 years ago. That ultimately is feeding databases, which get traded in sort of a gray aftermarket behind the scenes where data is bought and sold. And ultimately a combination of that data and data that's scraped from the public internet has created vast treasure troves of profiles about every American which reside in hundreds of data brokers databases today and which they sell to anyone and everyone that wants to buy it.

And is it as easy as just deleting it all? Or is it going to pop up next week, next month? Because there's so many people with this data. Yeah. Under today's laws, which hopefully we'll get a chance to talk about, which are changing and evolving rapidly because of this problem.

Under today's laws, there's no simple way to say, "Hey, remove me once and for all from your database." There's simply a way to say, "Hey, you're publishing a link to my profile. It contains information that I don't want exposed. My family, my children, my home address, the net worth of my house, my cell phone number for robocallers," all this kind of stuff.

And you can say, "Hey, opt me out of that. I don't want that link shown to anybody, period, or resold." And so the design of our service, and that's Delete Me and similar services that you can find, have built into it an annual subscription where we relentlessly go back and monitor and look to see if these data brokers get your information again, and then republish it.

And a couple of stats I'd love to know. On average, how many hours does each session save? Yeah, it's a great question. Over a year, our average customer will save 60 to 80 hours of their life through signing up for us. So we think at $129, that's a pretty good deal.

What percentage of people after that first report have stuff pop up again in the same places you've already scanned? Is that 90% of people that comes back or how frequent is that? Yeah, so about 35% of our customers will see their personal information repopulated in some shape or form at a data broker that we remove them from after six months.

Wow. And how have laws affected this? Right now, we have a patchwork of state laws, more and more going through different legislatures. There's laws that have been passed recently in Colorado and Utah and Vermont, and they continue to evolve mainly based on California, which was mainly based on the European GDPR and all these laws.

I mean, I'm not a lawyer, I'm an entrepreneur, but they're all this sort of the same shape and size to me. When I look at them, they have all these nuances, but they grant citizens rights to access their data, correct their data if they're mistake being made that they find and to redact or remove or delete their data in certain instances as well.

So the really good news here is that no matter where you live, it is almost guaranteed that you're going to get more rights to wherever your data is located in any database that's custodying it. And that's good for everybody, except for the companies that are doing stuff with your data that you don't want them to do.

They might be less profitable and I'm okay with that, but is it as simple as if I have a friend that lives in California, can I use their address when I submit this form so that I can take advantage of some of those protections or if I open up a PO box in California, is that enough?

It's not simple. You can't simply claim you're a resident, but we do like playing tricks on the data brokers ourselves. So we do what we can. We use threats under the CCPA for residents of other States to get things removed. And a lot of times companies are not mal-intentioned and sometimes they will just do it.

They want an easy process as well to make things efficient. So if California sets a certain bar, their processes will often be extended to other States. That said, there are some frustrating data brokers out there that I would call the true bad guys that really just don't give a damn.

How hard can it be for some sites to remove your data? Yeah, it's a whole litany of things. I mean, every one of these data brokers has different processes and some of them are super technical and efficient. And I'd go so far as to say almost user-friendly, almost, but many of them are not, and they are increasingly changing them, requiring more identity verification, "Hey, give us your phone number.

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So please consider supporting those who support us. I think about this in the context of my children and I'm like, wait, there's no information about them on the internet yet, right? How soon should I be worried about this for them? It's a great question. And I was just on another podcast with somebody talking about a new law in California that they just passed in addition to the CCPA, which is designed to protect children's data on social media in ways that it is currently not protected.

And the problem is it, this data starts leaking out about our kids earlier and earlier. We give them iPads, we give them access to watch streaming media. When kids used to watch TV, TV had no idea there was a kid in the room. Now they know and they know exactly what's being watched, when, for how long.

And they'll eventually connect the dots to exactly who that identity is. And that's somebody's children. And I was just talking about this concept, which I think is pretty scary. And I'm a parent as well, of a digital profile being built up over many, many years from when somebody is, say, 10 years old to when somebody's post graduated from college and starting out in their work life and then getting married and everything, if that digital trail can be correlated from that child all the way through, and there's the amount of data that we think there is in these profiles, whether it's Apple, Google, Amazon, who knows?

I think big tech might be able to predict things about your child that you would never be able to predict. And for them to have that level of information, I don't know what they're going to do with it. Maybe it's innocent and they just want to sell you stuff and maybe they cross lines, but it's pretty scary to me because I don't know as a parent, you know, what the possibilities are if big tech ends up with more insight about my children than I have.

And so what's the solution? Is it don't let your kids use an iPhone or a Gmail? Cause that seems like it would not go over well for most families. It wouldn't. And I don't think that's the solution. I think that, you know, modern life requires us to participate in using modern technology.

So I think the best thing to do as a parent for children is some of the basics I think you've talked about in some of your other podcasts, you know, one is do not let them use the same email for all their different accounts. Whether they have a streaming media account and then a Snapchat account or an Instagram account, create a different profile with no linkage between a common email or a common phone number so that the data about them can't be aggregated and correlated.

That's, I think, very important. And then I think, you know, the basic things that most parents are already doing, limiting some, some screen time and teaching them about the do's and don'ts of social media and actually teaching them about digital advertising as well, Hey, when you're watching a streaming media, here's who's making money and why the ads are being sold to you and this kind of thing.

So last thing you've been in this space a lot longer than me. Is there other data out there that I should be trying to make sure it's removed? That's not my contact information or pictures of my house and floor plans and all that kind of stuff. Everyone should be Googling themselves on a semi-regular basis and seeing what those results look like, because you never know what data is out there and presented in what context.

Beyond that, there are a ton of hidden data sets about us that we should be more aware of and we should constrain the use of that includes your credit card company, selling all the data about your transactions. That includes your telephone carrier and your ISP selling data about your behaviors that they collect sort of secretly without telling you.

I think Verizon sent out a huge notice to all their customers. I mean, it was amazing to read this because it was like, here's why we value your choice and your privacy. And then you read it and you're like, hold on, this whole five pages written by the best lawyers in the world are all about how they're selling all of your data from your cell phone and your ISP service to anyone they want.

So could I email Verizon and say, hey, please stop doing this? Is that like an option for a lot of these companies that they don't tell you about and make easy to know? It is. And again, if you're a resident of a state, not just California, but there's five or 10 other states now that have specific privacy laws that you can cite, it makes it easier for them to have to comply with some of your requests.

But all of this stuff requires some knowledge, some expertise, and that's the kind of thing that we want to bring to our customers. And even if you're not a customer, you can come visit us and ask us a question and our privacy advisors will try to help out and rest assured, you know, it's not just us, but we are trying to map out where these data sets are, how to go constrain the resale of your data, even if you like the product, right?

Like I'm happy with my cell phone service from T-Mobile. I don't want to stop being a customer of T-Mobile, but I want to understand what my rights are to make sure they're not doing things with my data that I wouldn't want. And I got to say, the first thing I found when I was doing my search on myself is you guys have a site where it's like, if you don't want to pay us, that's fine.

Here's a list of how to remove yourself from all the data brokers. So I appreciate that, though. After going through that process, I'm not sure it was worth my time. And, you know, this episode was a follow up to the last one because there was so much I needed to go do that I hadn't done.

Now I feel like I have a few more calls to make with Verizon and my ISP. So now maybe I'm going to have to do a second follow up with everyone to share what else I found and worked on removing. But this has been great. Thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me, Chris. OK, so hopefully that was really helpful to hear a little bit from Rob about Delete Me. I'm a big fan of the product. I want to talk about some other personal data that I found online that I was surprised about and really spent some time thinking about what to do.

So a lot of it was related to real estate. And whether you rent or buy, there was probably some website when you found your home or your apartment that you looked at in order to decide you wanted it. Maybe it was Zillow, maybe it was Hotpads. There are a bunch of sites online, apartments.com, where real estate brokerage sites, MLS sites, apartment rental sites.

And they almost never take down the information about your property. On top of that, it seems like every house has its own website. And that website often doesn't get taken down. And that website might not just have photos of the house. They might have the floor plans. They might have all of the disclosure packet.

They might have one of those Matterport 3D walkthroughs. So aside from just personal data, if someone is able to get your address, I figure it's probably not beneficial for someone to be able to click through 57 pictures of your house in every room or download your floor plans. So I would recommend reaching out to two sources.

One, any of the sites that have this information, sites like Zillow and Redfin or apartments.com, they all have an ability to opt out and request pictures or be removed from the website, but also to the real estate agent who listed the house if you purchased it. They can actually go into the MLS and remove all those photos, which will push out to all of these sites and they'll update them.

They can also take down the pages on their own website. And something else you can do is once any of these sites have been removed, whether it's pictures or content, Google and Bing have a remove outdated content tool that I mentioned when I was talking with Rob, which will actually go in and remove the search results.

So Google's out there indexing the Internet, right? They're not trying to store your information. But if you delete a picture from Zillow, Google might not immediately know that that picture is gone. So Google has this tool and Bing has one as well where you can say, hey, in your search results, there's a picture.

But the actual website that has that picture is no longer there. And in somewhere between minutes and hours, you can give them the URL of that picture. If Google says, oh, yeah, you're right, that picture is not there. They'll remove it immediately from their search results. So that happens over time, naturally over about a month or weeks.

But if you want to get it gone right away, you can use their remove outdated content tool, which I'll link to in the show notes also. And finally, when it comes to maps, you can actually reach out to Google, Bing and Apple and ask them to blur your house on Street View.

I will point out that it is a irreversible decision. So make sure that you really want to do this now and forever if you make that request, but it is something you can do. And then finally, when it comes to personal data, if you've set up a trust for yourself or your family, know two things.

One, it is possible for someone to find out who the trustees are on that trust. So it doesn't really protect anyone from finding out who you are, what you do. It does make it a little more obfuscated. So if you do want to buy your home and you want to buy it in a way that no one will be able to trace it to you, you probably should be doing that in an LLC and likely a two tiered LLC for true privacy.

And that's for things like, you know, your car registration, your house deed, you know, even if you buy I bonds or something. So that's something to do if you want the most privacy. Most of those things don't show up on the Internet, but they are records that someone could usually request or find from different places, especially with your home.

But if you do just have a trust, you know, maybe consider not naming it the John Doe Trust, maybe come up with a name that is a little bit different so that it's not so obvious who it is. OK, so that's personal data. There's just a couple other things I'll hit on before I wrap.

I was thinking about how all these data brokers get your information and you're filling out your address online all the time. And obviously, if you're trying to ship something to your house, you might need to put your address there so you get it. But you can also get a P.O.

box at the post office. You can go to UPS and actually get a P.O. box, but one that has a real street address and can receive packages, even packages, whether they're FedEx or DHL or something else. There are a lot of virtual mailbox services online where you can get an address in a city and send mail there and they'll scan it.

You can even send packages there and they'll reship them to you. So depending on how much you want to complicate the process of receiving mail, you could get one of these services and send your mail there and not have to worry about it, or even just use it for websites where you don't think you need to be giving out your home address, but you need to give out an address.

But you want it to be yours in case for some reason there's something that's going to come. When I did some quick research at the lowest price point online, these virtual mailboxes where they scan your mail, you can get them at like ten dollars a month. You might have to pay for the scans, but you know, you can at least get the address PO box at the post office in the Bay Area is about 20 bucks.

And then a lot of other postal services where you can receive packages and mail were anywhere from 20 to 40 dollars a month because you can't receive packages if you get a PO box at the post office, unless they're USPS packages. When it comes to unsolicited mail, there's a website, DMA Choice, which you can go in and submit yourself and say, I don't want to receive unsolicited mail, please stop sending it to me.

They also let you put your email address on a stop spamming me list. That's an option. If you're getting catalogs you don't want, you can always call the catalog company and ask to remove you. And then if you're not already on the do not call registry and don't want more spam calls, that's an option.

Also, a lot of carriers have recently launched their own apps that you can download to block and screen spam calls. And most of those are free as well. So I know this is a lot of information. Hopefully the show notes will be helpful in organizing it and figuring out what you want to do and taking action.

This was a scary but kind of fun process for me because now I feel a lot better. You certainly don't need to take all of these actions, right? You can decide which ones are the most important to you and focus on those. But I wanted to make sure I kind of tried to gather everything I could and put it in one place for all of you so that if this is important to you, you know what to do and you know how to do it.

So hopefully that's really helpful. And I really appreciate you guys listening. Definitely. If you think other people need to know this, share this episode with them. You can share it straight from the player app. You can share a link to the website, whatever is easiest. I really appreciate it.

I would love as many people as possible to be able to protect themselves online and fight back against these brokers, scammers, fishers and everyone out there. Really just that suck, to be honest. So thank you so much for listening. I will see you next week.