The 4 Simple Steps to Cleaning Up Your Online Presence in 5 Minutes or Less

1. Find a good password manager.

2. Create strong passwords and store them in a password manager.

3. Change all of your passwords to your new, strong passwords.

4. Get an email address for every service you use.

If you spend more than 5 minutes on the internet, it’s not a matter of if, but when you’ll get spammed. The good news is that there are some simple steps you can take to protect yourself online and keep your online presence clean. Here’s how:

Step

You can’t avoid the internet, but you can turn down its volume.

In a world where everyone is online all the time, how can you go about your business without constantly being interrupted by things that don’t matter?

The solution is to minimize your own digital footprint. That’s how you’ll control what other people know about you, and therefore what they might use to interrupt you.

Four simple steps:

By reducing the amount of information out there about you, you’ll shrink the surface area for spam and harassment. You’ll be able to focus on what matters.

I recommend you do these four things right now:

1) Remove yourself from data broker sites: One of my favorites is PeekYou.com, which makes it ridiculously easy to gather personal information about almost anyone based on their name and location. Go to PeekYou.com, search for yourself using your name or email address, and click “claim this page.” You’ll have to verify your identity via Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever other social network PeekYou has scraped up information about you from, but once you do that you can delete your profile completely. You can also use PeekYou to figure out which other data broker sites have collected information about you; there are

In the past few years, millions of people have woken up to a rude shock. They’ve discovered that their personal information is being used to send spam email, sell products, and even steal their identity.

It was all made possible by scammers illegally collecting their personal information from companies and then selling it on the internet black market.

It’s easy for companies to collect your personal information without you knowing about it. It’s also not hard for them to lose control over that information.

It’s been estimated that more than 1 billion personal records were lost or exposed on the internet between 2005 and 2015, including names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. The average cost of each data breach incident has reached \$3 million.

So, you have a LinkedIn account. You’ve been on it for years, maybe even since you started your first job after college. You update it every year or two, when you remember. And when you do, you make sure to upload a photo and add some more “skills” to your profile so that it looks good to recruiters and hiring managers who search for people like you.

Maybe you’ve also got a Facebook account. But that’s just for friends and family, right? They’re not going to see anything on there that would hurt your professional reputation or land you in trouble at work. And you definitely don’t want anyone other than your closest friends seeing those photos from last weekend’s tailgate party…

Or are they okay? Are those Facebook photos really going to hurt your career prospects? What about the embarrassing things that other people tag you in? The drunken posts on Twitter or Instagram? Or the questionable websites where you’ve chosen to leave comments?

The Internet is a very, very big place. So big, in fact, that it’s impossible to even comprehend the amount of information floating around out there all at once. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, I played around with the search engine Wolfram Alpha and attempted to calculate just how many websites are currently online. According to the engine, approximately 5.5 billion web pages exist online.

That’s a lot of pages! And if you think about it for a second or two, that number actually makes sense. The Internet is one of humanity’s greatest inventions and as such has continually evolved over time to accommodate our ever-changing needs. As we move into 2011, the Internet has become an integral part of our daily lives and it helps us do everything from making friends to finding jobs and paying bills.

Unfortunately, this means that more people than ever before are looking at your personal information online. And while the Internet can be a great way to keep in touch with old friends and meet new people, it can also be a potential minefield for anyone who wants to harm you in some way.

Knowing this, maybe you’ve spent some time recently going through your social networking profiles on sites like Facebook or Twitter and culling any sensitive photos

You know how you can’t find a picture of yourself on Google Images, because everyone else’s name is your name? Well, I have the solution for you.

The problem is that there are a lot of people with your name. But there’s only one of you. So what we need to do is figure out how to make it so that when someone puts in your name, they get you, and not anybody else.

I’m not talking about getting rid of every other picture of you on the Internet. That would take too long, and it would be pointless anyway. What we really want is to have our pictures show up first when someone searches for us on Google Images.

If this sounds like something you want to do, keep reading, and I’ll show you step-by-step how to do it.