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Data Privacy Week 2025: Protecting Yourself from Personal Data Exploitation

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Last Modified Date: Jan 25, 2025

It’s Data Privacy Week 2025! To mark this week, we’re sharing some tips to help you stay more private and better protect yourself from the dangers of personal data exploitation.

Whether it takes the form of phishing, voice and messaging scams, password cracking, impersonation, identity fraud, Business Email Compromise (BEC), or other attack vectors, the weaponization of personal data remains at the root of most successful cyberattacks, scams, and data breaches.

Here are some actionable steps you can take to reclaim control of your personal data and prevent its misuse:

Fine-tune your privacy settings across all digital platforms to better control who sees your information and how it’s used. Regularly review and update these settings on social networks, email accounts, and apps. A great resource for managing your privacy settings across a range of sites, apps, and services can be found here: Manage Your Privacy Settings – National Cybersecurity Alliance (staysafeonline.org).

Carefully consider the information you share on social platforms and other websites. All the bits of info you share can be put together by anyone, including scammers, to create an accurate profile of you. While companies might use this profile for targeted advertising, malicious actors can use it for spear-phishing, identity fraud, impersonation attacks, and physical threats.

Use Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) across all accounts. MFA adds an extra layer of security, ensuring that even if your password is compromised, unauthorized users can’t easily gain access. For those at elevated risk, hardware-based MFA tokens (such as FIDO or YubiKeys) are recommended. These physical keys make it nearly impossible for attackers to intercept the authentication process, as they require direct possession of the token to gain access. 

Since everyone has been involved in a data breach at some point, reusing passwords across different accounts, like bank logins, work systems, and personal email, creates a serious vulnerability. You can check for emails and passwords that have been involved in data breaches via haveIbeenpwned.com or similar services. 

Use a Password Manager to generate and securely store complex, unique passwords for each account. Password Managers also provide protection against credential harvesting by recognizing legitimate websites and preventing users from entering credentials on fraudulent or spoofed sites designed to steal login information.

Organizations should use password managers that employ AES-256 encryption. They should be tied to email addresses rather than phone numbers, and secured with long, unique passwords and protected by multi-factor authentication (MFA). 

Data broker sites post our personal information, without our consent, for anyone to see. Bad actors use this info for social engineering and credential harvesting, password cracking, identity fraud, doxxing, and more. 

Data broker sites make it relatively easy for someone to phish you, impersonate you, or take over your accounts.

It’s time to opt out. Optery offers free scans and exposure reports that show you where your data is, and free self-service removal tools. For broader coverage and hands-off convenience, opt for one of our subscription plans and Optery will handle the removals for you at scale. 

Companies should offer personal data removal for their employees, and removal efforts should extend beyond executives to close security gaps and proactively protect against today’s most common attack vectors.

A fundamental defensive measure in a breached world is to secure your credit. A credit freeze restricts access to your credit report, making it harder for identity thieves to open accounts in your name. Reach out to the big three credit bureaus: Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax, and activate a credit freeze. It’s a simple yet effective way to safeguard your financial identity. And remember to freeze your children’s credit also. A great resource for doing this is FrozenPii.com.

Opt for browsers like Brave, Mozilla Firefox, and Tor, and search engines like DuckDuckGo for enhanced privacy. For more info, see our complete guide on Web Browsing Privacy.

Reduce unwanted tracking and personal data collection with a tool like Optery’s Global Privacy Control (GPC) browser extension. The Optery GPC browser extension sends a signal to websites you visit, informing them that you do not want your personal information sold or shared. It works on websites that respect the GPC standard and ensures your privacy preferences are automatically communicated without you having to do so manually on each site.

For businesses, and even for individual domain owners, it’s crucial to implement DMARC policies in your DNS settings. DMARC helps to prevent email spoofing and protect against impersonation attacks by verifying that the sender’s email messages are legitimate and authorized by the domain’s owner. This step is particularly vital in safeguarding against phishing and spear-phishing attacks that might target your organization or exploit your identity to deceive others.

Share knowledge about online safety with less tech-savvy individuals to protect them from digital threats and scams. Discuss with your family the importance of privacy settings and cautious data sharing. It is especially important to educate adolescents and older adults who may need help staying safe online. 

As we reflect on the importance of data privacy, let’s also act to take control of our personal data and prevent its exploitation. Whether it’s removing our information from data broker lists, freezing our credit, tightening our privacy settings, or taking other precautions, every step counts. Let’s use this week as a starting point for a safer and more secure future. 

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