REVISED AND EXPANDED FOR 2025!
The full text of Disengage is available below. Want the whole thing to go? Download all this for free!
A full EPUB version of the guide.
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An Excel spreadsheet to help you remove your private information from data broker sites, delete unused accounts, and more.
PDF worksheets to help you clarify your goals, gather resources, and develop plans
as you reclaim your money, data, labor, attention, and permission
from surveillance capitalists.
Postcards to print, cut, and distribute "guerrilla marketing" style.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction
Part 1: Why Disengage?
Chapter 1: What We’re Fighting Against
Chapter 2: How Do We Reclaim Our Lives By Disengaging?
Chapter 3: Giants In The Dark
Part 2: Disengage By…Reclaiming Your Data
Chapter 4: Pay Attention to Privacy Policies
Chapter 5: Control Your Online Accounts
Chapter 6: Bash The Brokers
Chapter 7: Surf In Secret
Chapter 8: Escape Email Tracking
Chapter 9: Protect Your Phone
Chapter 10: Stop Being Loyal
Part 3: Disengage By…Reclaiming Your Home
Chapter 11: Hide Your Home Address
Chapter 12: Remove Your Home Photos From The Web
Chapter 13: Banish Smart Products From Your Spaces
Part 4: Disengage By…Reclaiming Your Content
Chapter 14: Protect Your Posts
Chapter 15: Retract Your Reviews
Chapter 16: Say Sayonara To Social Media
Part 5: Disengage By…Reclaiming Your Attention
Chapter 17: Don’t Surf If You Don’t Need To
Chapter 18: Annihilate Ads
Chapter 19: Say See Ya To Your Smartphone
Chapter 20: Ghost Corporate News
Part 6: Disengage By…Quitting The Big 4
Chapter 21: Say Goodbye To Google
Chapter 22: Say Au Revoir To Amazon
Chapter 23: Say Arrivederci To Apple
Chapter 24: Say Mmm-Bye To Microsoft
Part 7: Live Your Life
Acknowledgments
FOREWORD
Are We in Paradise Yet?
Imagine your town has a public square. It isn’t perfect…there are no fancy fountains or ice cream stands, but it’s a pleasant place to hang out with your family and friends.
The city sells the square to a few large companies, who rename the area “Paradise Square.” They upgrade the bathrooms, add athletic fields, and install the fancy fountain and ice cream stand the place was missing.
Everything is great. The ice cream is so cheap! The toilets in the bathrooms have heated seats!
Then things start to change. The businesses that own the square install retina scanners at the ice cream stand, bathrooms, fountain, and athletic field. Whenever you use one of these amenities, information ranging from your name and address to your physical attributes and income is sent off to some shadowy entity. Not only that, but the ice cream stand starts selling knockoff treats.
You start noticing more and more that something is off. Before you do so much as sit on a bench, you have to sign a waiver that’s too long and complicated to actually read through. The company that installed the bench tells the ice cream stand what kind of pants you’re wearing, and the ice cream people use that detail to parse out what kind of ice cream you like best so they can hawk it to you the next time you walk by. (Ooh, those Dolce & Gabbana cargo pants must mean you’ll spring for extra sprinkles!)
Each time you sign a waiver and sit down, you’re beset by dozens of skeezy salespeople who all seem to know your name. Sometimes they're already there when you approach the bench, and there are so many of them you can’t even sit down. You even start seeing them outside the park—on billboards lining the highway, at the movie theater, on top of taxicabs.
A few times, your wallet is stolen. You also notice people hiding in the bushes with recording devices. For reasons unknown, they’re recording your conversations with your friends.
The ice cream stand goes out of business. The park had required them to charge such low prices, the owner couldn't pay their employees sustainable wages.
Even worse, you have nowhere else to meet your friends and family. Thanks to all the cheap goods and formerly fine amenities, so many citizens flocked to Paradise Park that the other parks quietly closed down.
As you sit on the rigged bench, hungry, mikes in your face, salespeople circling, you ask yourself:
“Is this really Paradise?”
INTRODUCTION
THE POWER WE DIDN'T KNOW WE HAVE
If you’re reading this, you’re probably intrigued by the idea of disengaging from the companies that have made the internet a worse place to be, but are not really clear on why you’d want to do it…and how to make it happen. Especially if you’re already busy, you know, living life.
Read on to learn what inspired me to write this book, discover our secret power, and get some important caveats out of the way before we dive in.
THE ORIGINS OF THIS BOOK
When I started my freelance company in the 1990s, most of my business was conducted via the library and post office. Over time, however, the internet became my go-to for developing ideas, researching prospects, and sending sales letters.
Even this early on, I was uncomfortable with the ubiquity of ads and how they seemed to follow you wherever you went. In 2000, I started a blog—though back then it was called a “weblog”—where I highlighted instances of ads showing up where they shouldn’t be: inside the holes on a golf course, on urinal cakes, in schools. The website garnered some positive attention, but I shuttered it when I became too overwhelmed with paying work to keep it up.
THE SPIRIT OF THE WEBLOG LIVED ON
As an entrepreneur online, I tried so hard to work within the system that had been set up for us. I joined every social platform that popped up, took marketing gurus’ advice to heart, and subscribed to the whole “rise and grind” mentality.
But the spirit of my old weblog always lived in me.
I was an active member of SPAM-L, a listserv of mostly software experts who parsed out the headers of spam emails to report the senders to their Internet Service Providers.
I went to a conference for online business owners, and felt like a total weirdo when I raised my hand in front of the fawning audience and asked the internet-famous presenter, “You brag about being available to answer questions from clients at 4 am. How is that…scalable?”
When a business coach I’d hired asked what style of business owner I wanted to be, I answered, “I want to just do good work and have people who need it, buy it. Is that so wrong?”
I stopped offering mailing list sign-up incentives and chopped my list from 10,000 lurkers to 800 engaged readers. Why pay to reach people who didn’t care?
I despised having to keep up with the ever-changing whims of social media, internet marketing rockstars, and Google-pleasing content formats in order to stay afloat. (Micro content! No, long-form content! No, wait...video! Haha, j/k about all those videos you spent loads of resources creating.)
Beyond business, I was tired of finding my personal information where it shouldn’t be.
I hated that corporations were privy to intimate details about my family, income, spending habits, hobbies, voting record, and property—which they used to try to sell me solutions to problems I never knew I had. Not to mention, these companies’ lax data protection processes meant my private details were compromised in data breach after data breach. (And this is not a problem only for the living: A deceased relative recently had their personal data leaked.)
I resented being forced to buy from megacorps like Amazon because the products I needed were no longer available anywhere else.
I hated the idea that my content, labor, dollars, data, and attention were feeding these companies and helping them grow more powerful. (Here we are in 2025, and these companies are virtually running the country.)
Finally, I couldn’t remember what it felt like to move through the world without a sense of being constantly watched—without worrying, for example, that someone’s Alexa will record and share me saying something better left unsaid. Yet I experienced the irresistible pull to be online all day long, feeding the companies that oppressed us, lest I miss the chance to attract attention.
RECLAIMING OUR POWER
But what could I do about it? I started researching and reading about surveillance capitalism, monopolies and monopsonies, chokepoint capitalism, the decline of common spaces, and other relevant topics. It was disheartening to get to the end of a book only to learn that the solutions were always structural…because, of course, structural problems require structural solutions.
I get it. We clearly need to push for better privacy legislation, stronger antitrust laws, and better lobbying laws.
But I didn’t read all those books and do all that research because I wanted to learn what other people could do about the problem. I wanted to know what I—a middle-class retiree who doesn’t like politics, protesting, or public speaking—could do about it.
Not to mention, it took 40+ years to get us into this mess. Even if we work full-speed ahead to undo it, we will have to live under this system for many years. What can we regular humans do to protect ourselves and others now, before all the right societal changes finally come about?
Here’s the great news: We individuals do have power we can wield using the time and resources we have right now. That power is in:
Our data
Our content
Our labor
Our participation
Our attention
Our dollars
Our permission
These are the lifeblood of the businesses destroying the internet and controlling our lives, and we can all withdraw at least some of them to some extent. We can subvert the system in small ways. We can refuse to be profiled, pigeonholed, pinned down.
We can disengage.
This is why, in the spring of 2023, I embarked on an ambitious project: I wanted to drastically reduce the amount of time I spent online, shrink my digital footprint, and reclaim the sources of power I listed above.
The purpose of this guide is to share what I discovered on this journey, in case it might help others the way it’s helped me. There are no affiliate links in the guide, and it’s free. I don’t track who downloads the guide.
If you would like to show your appreciation for Disengage, here are three suggestions:
Share the guide with at least one person.
Sign up for infrequent, non-spammy updates at punchinguppress.com.
Volunteer to distribute postcards for this book, “guerrilla marketing” style. Here's where you can download a PDF to print and cut. Put them in books at the bookstore, in Little Free Libraries, at the gym, etc. I’ll even mail you postcards if you don't want to print them! Email me at punchinguppress@proton.me.
In short, if you want to say thanks…the best way is to help get this book into more people’s hands!
WHAT’S NEW IN THE 2025 UPDATE
I updated this guide in 2025 for three reasons:
After the 2024 election, it seems clear that the very corporations that we’re fighting against here will now have almost unlimited power. I expect that surveillance will increase, consumer laws will be weakened, and many of our elected representatives will cave in to the lure of money and power offered by these businesses.
Artificial Intelligence has been scooping up more and more of the content we’ve spent so many years diligently creating online.
In some cases, it’s to spit out that content in a “new” form, such as when an AI uses real content creators’ work as fodder to create fast and free content, whether written content, video, or art...cutting the actual content producers out of the picture. (A big drive behind AI is to “train” it using employees’ and vendors’ work so it can later replace those people in their jobs.)
In other cases, AI’s purpose is to invade our privacy by, say, using online photos to learn how to identify people.
Businesses and institutions are now trying to use our demographic and behavioral metrics to pull more money out of our wallets, aka “surveillance pricing.” For example, the McDonald’s app can tell when you get paid and increase the price of your order that day. Some car brands share your driving data with your auto insurance company so the company can raise your rates if they think you take corners too fast. Grocery stores are experimenting with personalized pricing based on your data, meaning that bag of apples may cost more for you than for your neighbor.
Here are some of the changes I made to Disengage.
Updated links, prices, and advice. New services, social media sites, risks, and possibilities for disengaging have come into being since the original writing, and I wanted to be as thorough as possible.
Added a chapter on corporate-controlled news media.
Added ideas that are a bit more tech-heavy to match the seriousness of the situation we may be facing in 2025 and beyond. If you’re not a technophile, simply skip these tips
Made changes to reflect what I’ve learned in the past two years of implementing the advice in this guide; for example, I added my experiences with using a “dumb phone,” trying out a paid search engine, installing a privacy OS on my phone, and using a PO box. Some of these were wins, and some were fails.
The world changes fast! I hope this updated version of Disengage helps you reclaim your data, dollars, labor, and attention...and in doing so, helps reshape the country to reflect the needs of regular people instead of billionaires.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN IN THIS GUIDE
Disengage offers my research, experiences, and advice in the following areas.
PART 1: Why Disengage?
Here, I quickly discuss the concepts of surveillance capitalism, chokepoint capitalism, the exploitation of our common spaces, and the billionaire class, aka the “broligarchy.” You’ll also discover the side benefits to disengaging, and get a reality check on how much of our power we can reasonably reclaim.
PART 2: Disengage By…Reclaiming Your Data
We’ll tackle how to control your online accounts, secure your phone and email, remove unwanted photos and personal information from the internet, remove your details from data broker lists, and much more
PART 3: Disengage By…Reclaiming Your Home
You’ll keep our corporate overlords—and other randos—from peeking into your home by hiding your home address, removing photos of your home from real estate sites and street view apps, and keeping smart home products from tracking and sharing your private data.
PART 4: Disengage By…Reclaiming Your Content
Your unpaid content is the very backbone of the businesses that are oppressing us. You’ll learn how to rein in content you’ve already posted, how to quit social media, and how to make your content labor work for you…plus how to shrink your footprint on social media if you don't want to (or can’t) quit.
PART 5: Disengage By…Reclaiming Your Attention
All day long, we’re pulled in different directions by the whims of the hyper-capitalist companies that have taken over our lives. This section will share advice on how to annihilate ads as well as ideas for ditching the most distracting gadget ever created: your smartphone.
PART 6: Disengage By…Quitting The Big 4
Hopefully, all of the above prepared you for the biggest challenge: kicking Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft to the curb. This section includes alternatives for the most popular products provided by these companies.
PART 7: Live Your Life
They say living well is the best revenge. Here, I offer encouragement as you continue your journey, more ideas on topics to pursue, and appreciation that you took the time to read—and hopefully take action on—this book.
WORKSHEETS
Download these PDF worksheets that help you take action on each part of this book.
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
You’ll find three types of boxes in this guide. And because we’re PUP: Punching Up Press, they will be Chihuahua-related. (You will need to download the PDF of the guide to see the Chi icons!)
EXTRA CREDIT boxes are for readers who are tech-savvy and/or like to go the extra mile.
BEWARE boxes include scams to watch out for or caveats to the advice given.
TRY THIS NOW boxes highlight tasks you can do right as you’re reading this guide. They’re typically quick and easy, or a small part of a larger task that will help get you rolling. You don’t have to do the Try This Now task right now, even though the Chihuahua is in a hurry. It’s your choice.
THE REQUISITE DISCLAIMERS
I did my best to cover as much ground as I could, but I can’t possibly include every single detail I uncovered in my research. For example, Google tracks us in so many ways it would take another book to describe them.
WHY ARE YOU DISSING MY LOCAL GROCERY STORE?
You’ll notice that the content in this guide ranges beyond the internet at times. Why am I covering direct mail, smart products, and store loyalty programs.
It’s because I’m attempting to choke off the flow of data traveling from online to offline and vice versa. The less of your personal data of any kind flying around the world, the less there is to fall into the hands of those who would abuse it.
HOW TECHNICAL IS THIS GOING TO GET?
I consider myself a “medium techie” person; I’ve been on the internet since the early 1990s, and built my first website in 1997 using an HTML guide I found in a phone booth. Having run a business that required me to be online most of the time, I’ve picked up strong skills in some areas. I even learned enough Python to hand-code a Reddit bot!
At the same time, I don’t want to have to get a Ph.D. to minimize my online footprint, increase my privacy, and subvert Big Tech and other oppressors. So I generally use—and recommend—solutions that don’t require a lot of technical knowledge.
If I happen to know about, or have used, a more advanced solution for some of the issues in this guide—like syndicating your website content to social media,
installing a privacy-forward operating system on your phone, or using emulators to play video games—I’ll mention them and offer outside resources where appropriate. If you’re interested in any of these tactics, please look up how to implement them.
A NOTE ON PRIVILEGE
I’m in the very fortunate position of having the time to spend plugging away at this endeavor, and available cash for products and services—within reason—to take care of some of the related tasks for me. I also have no disabilities or medical situations requiring me to buy from Big Tech, and don’t belong to a marginalized group that can find support only in online communities
As you’ll see throughout this guide, it’s easy to adjust this process as needed to make it work for your particular situation. For example:
Almost all of the products I recommend are free or have free alternatives.
You decide how much time and effort you want to put into this project.
You choose whichever tactics make the most sense for you.
It’s up to you how strict or lenient you want to be in various areas to account for your job, schooling, family situation, medical and financial needs, and so on.
Even a small amount of effort can make a difference; for example, installing a free anti-tracker extension, changing your phone settings, getting a “burner” email address, or switching your book buying from Amazon to independent online booksellers will offer some benefit with little time and money spent.
Best of all, most of the effort required is front-loaded. Once you get your chosen systems set up, they should run as smoothly for you as your old ones. (Or even more smoothly!)
For example, it takes a good amount of thought and effort to switch from Apple Music to SoundCloud, or to change your default browser and search engine—but once you do it, you won’t have to think about it again.
IF YOU NEED MORE HELP
If you need to protect yourself from a stalker, are being doxed, or otherwise need stronger methods than you’ll find in this guide, I highly recommend the book Extreme Privacy: What It Takes to Disappear by Michael Bazzell.
I finally bit the bullet and dropped $40 for the PDF version because I was curious, and...now I wish I had paid for the hard copy edition. This book is fascinating and very, very thorough. It’s a must-read for people who actually need to live under the radar.
In the first edition of Disengage, I talked a bit about throwing chaos into corporations’ tracking systems as a form of resistance. Extreme Privacy goes deep into using disinformation to throw Big Tech off your trail and gave me tons of new ideas, some of which I’ve already started putting into practice. I’ll share some of my experiences, but without giving away so much that it infringes on Bazzell’s great work.
If you want to know more, buy his book. It’s worth every cent! (Sadly, the author has stopped writing books because so many people downloaded illegal free copies of Extreme Privacy.)
PART 1: WHY DISENGAGE?
The biggest threats we’re fighting against in this guide are surveillance capitalism, chokepoint capitalism, the exploitation of our common spaces, and the rise of the “broligarchy”; you may have also heard of concepts like Big Data, Big Tech, and the attention economy, all of which play a role here. After reading about these systems, you may decide that you no longer want to participate in them.
CHAPTER 1: WHAT WE'RE FIGHTING AGAINST
Much of the villainy we’re going to discuss is perpetrated by just a handful of massive companies, including Google, Facebook, and Amazon. While I will give a brief overview of the ills created by each corporation later in this book, I won’t get into lengthy critiques of them since the resources I cite have already done it so thoroughly.
SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM IN UNDER 200 WORDS
Here’s how Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, describes surveillance capitalism in the Harvard Gazette:
[It’s the] unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. These data are then computed and packaged as prediction products and sold into behavioral futures markets—business customers with a commercial interest in knowing what we will do now, soon, and later.
In other words, businesses track us and collect our data in order to build psychological profiles they can use to predict what we’ll do or think...so they can sell us stuff we didn’t know we needed.
Zuboff points out that surveillance capitalism is like a one-way mirror: The companies know everything about us, yet we’re not privy to how they collect, use, share, and sell our personal information.
CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM IN UNDER 200 WORDS
To put it simply, chokepoint capitalism is when a business inserts itself between buyers and producers, extracting money without adding any value like a troll under a bridge.
Consider Apple: They not only control which apps you’re allowed to install on a phone you bought and own, they also claim a hefty portion of the fees you pay to the app producers.
Or Amazon: You buy their e-reader, but can only use it to read e-books you purchase from Amazon. Once you do that, you’re locked in; the price of switching to another e-reader is high, because your entire library of books is now held hostage on your Kindle.
This is a very simplified description. The history and methods of chokepoint capitalism are fascinating, including how businesses buy up competitors, and even parts of their own supply chain, to create inescapable monopolies that affect smaller businesses, workers, and creators. I highly recommend reading Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow, and subscribing to Doctorow’s ad-free newsletter.
THE EXPLOITATION OF OUR COMMON SPACES IN UNDER 200 WORDS
The hyper-capitalist businesses we’re resisting here also exploit the places we go to socialize and connect. In other words, they’ve created a monopoly over how we fulfill some of our most basic human needs.
So many of our friends and loved ones are on Facebook, for example, to leave it means we may have to sever some of those relationships. This is by design. We’re forced to check in frequently, conduct our conversations on the platform, and share our news there—giving Facebook more and more of our most intimate data.
THE TAKEOVER BY THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS IN UNDER 200 WORDS
Whatever you may think of the President, the fact that the top tech moguls were front and center at his inauguration is bad news for all of us. According to an article in The Hill:
[A] growing class of malignant oligarchs has initiated a campaign to exert unchallenged control over our democratic institutions and our economy. The war has already started, and the billionaires have a significant head start.
These individuals are hoarding unfathomably large amounts of wealth and are now wielding it to suppress critical media, co-opt our politics and defang our justice system. They have rigged our tax system so that they pay dramatically lower tax effective rates compared to working people. They have consolidated corporate power to shield themselves from scrutiny.
A large portion of these billionaires own the social media, tech, and news channels that follow our every move and shape our reality. They live on attention and suck up our labor and data to grow their power.
Surveillance capitalism, chokepoint capitalism, the exploitation of our personal spaces and relationships, the threat of “broligarchy” in 2025: We are nurturing the businesses to blame for these societal ills by constantly feeding them with everything they need to thrive.
CHAPTER 2: HOW DO WE RECLAIM OUR LIVES BY DISENGAGING?
When we disengage, we take everything with us: our data, our content, our attention, our money. Without all this, the exploitative businesses that have taken over can’t survive.
In other words, when bigger players are pushing you around the court, you take your ball and leave. You go off and play with nicer people, and the bullies are left with nothing.
THE SIDE BENEFITS TO DISENGAGING
Maybe it’s wishful thinking to believe we can do enough damage to take down the tech oligarchs who are invading our lives and damaging our communities. But even if we lose this battle, we can still win the war by claiming some important side benefits.
SIDE BENEFIT #1: WE PROTECT OURSELVES AGAINST IDENTITY THEFT
The more places storing your data, the more opportunities there are for that data to fall into the wrong hands. It seems like every month or so, I get an email from some company I did business with a decade ago letting me know their databases were breached, exposing my personal information to bad actors.
Cory Doctorow writes in Medium:
Like spies, online fraudsters are totally dependent on companies over-collecting and over-retaining our data. Multiple services have suffered breaches that exposed names, addresses, phone numbers, passwords, sexual tastes, school grades, work performance, brushes with the criminal justice system, family details, genetic information, fingerprints and other biometrics, reading habits, search histories, literary tastes, pseudonymous identities, and other sensitive information. Attackers can merge data from these different breaches to build up extremely detailed dossiers on random subjects and then use different parts of the data for different criminal purposes.
So it makes sense that the less data of yours that's available, the less likely criminals will be able to use it against you. (Not to mention, it will make it harder for surveillors to profile you, harder for businesses to use your behavioral data to swindle you, etc.)
SIDE BENEFIT #2: WE BECOME HARDER TO FIND
As I mentioned earlier, this guide isn’t meant to help readers evade stalkers or protect themselves from doxers or targeted surveillance.
However, making yourself harder to find online can help dissuade bad guys from targeting you. Someone who’s mildly pissed off at you, for example, may not bother to send you anonymous threats if it takes too much effort to find your phone number, email address, or home address.
SIDE BENEFIT #3: WE PROTECT OUR MENTAL HEALTH
We’ve all seen the news about how social media contributes to anxiety and depression, how being online too much can affect our sleep, and how email, texting, smartphones, and social media are designed to be as addictive as possible. The sounds, the colors, the three dots when someone is typing out a reply to our text, the satisfying little vibration when we successfully download an app...how can we not remain glued to our devices?
Then there’s our tendency to think social media represents the real world, and to compare ourselves to what we see in highly staged posts. (Which is as it’s meant to be.)
We see photos of a well-groomed mom with a perfectly dressed baby and wonder what’s wrong with us that our lives don’t look like that. We see images of family on an exotic beach and feel like a failure because the nicest place we’ve ever visited is the Holiday Inn in Newark. We watch a video by a fitness influencer who tells us he looks the way he does because he drinks Brand X protein shakes, and feel like losers because we don’t have the strength of will to follow his “simple health plan.”
What we don’t see;
The pile of dirty clothes the mom shoved into a corner before the shoot.
The three hours she spent on her hair and makeup.
The baby’s diaper blow-out ten minutes earlier.
The family fights on the sweaty vacation.
The hefty check the family received from the sponsors of the vacation you could never afford.
The fitness influencer straight-up lies about his eating habits because he's sponsored by the protein shake company...and also that he takes massive amounts of steroids to look the way he does.
None of this is good for us. That’s why, for some of us, disengaging can be an exercise in protecting our own mental health.
SIDE BENEFIT #4: WE DO BETTER WORK
Our jobs, businesses, and schooling are important to us, and the internet is making these things harder—not easier as we were once promised—because it puts a crimp in our ability to focus and be creative.
We’re all carrying digital debt: the inflow of data, emails, meetings, and notifications has outpaced humans’ ability to process it all. And the pace of work is only intensifying. Everything feels important, so we spend our workdays trying to get out of the red. Nearly 2 in 3 people (64%) say they struggle with having the time and energy to do their job—and those people are 3.5x more likely to also struggle with innovation and strategic thinking.
Of course, those of us who are in careers, businesses, or school aren’t in a position to simply drop Big Tech and all its products. But we can scale back enough to regain the crucial life and business skills we’ve lost.
SIDE BENEFIT #5: WE LIVE OUR LIVES THROUGH OUR OWN EYES
So much of online life is about seeking validation from others. After all, is there anyone alive who posts their thoughts, images, or personal details on the internet and doesn’t care about how many likes or comments they get?
This causes us to live life through the lens of a camera—even if it’s only a mental camera. When I was full-on bound by social media, no matter what I did, I would unconsciously start to put together a post about it in my mind. How can I make this thought sound more insightful? What hashtags would I use? What would be the best way to frame the image?
Once I scaled back, I started being able to enjoy my life for myself. I can now watch a sporting event, see a movie, read a book, or go on vacation without feeling the need to share it with the world. I can have a brilliant idea or laugh at a joke I heard and keep it to myself.
If I have a thought I really, really want to share, I can put it up on my own website and trust that if anyone is interested, they’ll find it.
SIDE BENEFIT #6: WE REBUILD OUR DECISION-MAKING SKILLS
Sometimes we rely on the hive mind of the internet so much, we forget what we want. There was a period of time when my first instinct, when I couldn’t figure something out, was to head to a forum or social media to ask for input. Do the colors in this drawing make sense? Would it be stupid to pay off a debt faster instead of investing the money? Are these jeans age-appropriate? The alternative was to ask Google...and get answers from a company with a stake in the answer.
I got answers aplenty, no thought required on my part. But were the choices really mine when I crowdsourced them?
The system was built this way. A voice search expert once told me that businesses were noticing that many searches started with “Should I…?”
The expert was giddy about the idea of people turning to faceless corporations to help make life-altering decisions—and offered up ways to make a brand appear trustworthy and knowledgeable by providing voice-search answers to these personal questions. (Should I buy a new pool? Why, yes, says the pool company, and here’s why! Should I feed my dry kibble? No way, according to the “primal” raw cat food company.)
When I started to disengage, I had to start relying on my own instincts, tastes, and preferences. Which is actually a good thing, because these are my possessions, my money, my clothing. I’m allowed to do whatever I want. I can draw in whatever colors are pleasing to my eye because I’m hanging the drawings in my own house. I can invest my money in whatever way makes sense to me, even if it’s not approved by a bank or investment firm with a stake in my decision.
Now if I have a question or problem, I research it on my own, take my own preferences into account, and make up my own mind.
Did you know you can do that? I didn’t, because the internet makes it so easy to ask for advice and validation that my decision-making muscles had withered into nothingness.
Opting out—to whatever extent you want to do it—helps you relearn your own likes, dislikes, needs, and wants and gives you the power to make decisions that work for you.
SIDE BENEFIT #7WE STOP SUPPLYING FREE LABOR TO FOR-PROFIT BUSINESSES
You may not know it, but you are a content producer. Everything you post online is used by social media companies, app developers, publishers, travel agencies, supplement sellers, and other businesses to gain legitimacy—and, ultimately, more eyeballs on whatever it is they’re trying to sell.
They also use that very content to gather data from you and from everyone who engages with it. (To add insult to injury, some businesses are using that content to train AI.)
When you post an inflammatory remark on Twitter/X, the firestorm of outrage benefits the platform and its advertisers while impoverishing you and your community. The comment you post on a news story brings more readers to the page, partly because Google’s search algorithm rewards pages with more content and more frequent updates.
These businesses need your content in order to survive and grow…and you don’t even get paid for it. Let’s stop spending our precious life energy keeping our oppressors in business!
In Chapter 16: Say Sayonara To Social Media, we’ll talk about alternative homes for content for those of us who make a living by building audiences or selling products and services online.
SIDE BENEFIT #8: WE SAVE MONEY
It’s true! Even if you choose to purchase tools to help you disengage, you’ll make up for whatever you spend because you will:
Learn to think about a purchase before running to Amazon the instant you decide you need something.
Free yourself of your Amazon Prime subscription, encouraging you to look for lower prices elsewhere. (As you’ll learn later in this guide, Amazon does not prioritize good deals.)
Purchase cheaper alternatives to overpriced smartphones.
See fewer ads enticing you to shop, shop, shop.
Earn more in your business because you aren't spending your time on ineffective social media marketing.
Buy fewer apps and make fewer in-app purchases.
Turn to free, open source software in place of some of your subscription-based software.
Stop losing money to branded apps that use surveillance pricing to charge you as much as they determine you can afford.
What will you do with all the money you save by disengaging?
SIDE BENEFIT #9: WE INSPIRE OTHERS...AND OURSELVES
When you make choices that are different from what most others are doing, it stands out. People will ask you about it.
For example, when I experimented with using a non-smart phone, even my optometrist was curious to know more. This gave me the opportunity to say, “I felt like I was getting addicted to my iPhone. So I switched to a non-smart phone as an experiment, and feel like my attention has improved. I don’t even miss it anymore.”
People usually respond by sharing their own experiences with divided attention, constant interruptions, and feeling tracked. Maybe some of them will wind up, if not ditching their smartphone altogether, at least deleting the most distracting apps or turning on the privacy controls.
So when someone asks you about your strange-looking email address or why you don’t shop on Amazon, it’s an opportunity to—quickly, non-judgmentally, and non-pedantically—explain your choice and hope it gets them to think differently.
On top of that, every action you take to withdraw your attention, data, content, and dollars from Big Tech requires a little effort, which strengthens your will to take even bigger actions in the future.
CHAPTER 3: GIANTS IN THE DARK
Maybe you want to scale back a little—or maybe you want to break up with our corporate masters and never look back. Consider this guide an idea book; it’s a list of strategies to pick and choose from depending on your wants, needs, resources, and abilities.
However, we first need to consider the forces working against our desire to disengage.
FORCE #1: THE ENEMY IS OVERPOWERED
A lot of very smart people are working very hard to gather our data, make sense of it, and use it for their own gain. They’re deploying powerful software and using every tech tool at their disposal to make this happen…while we’re too busy working, caring for our families, and generally living our lives to resist with the same intensity.
These businesses have taken over the internet in a way that makes them hard to evade. “Amazon, Google, and Meta (formerly Facebook) have become pillars of the modern internet infrastructure, and are impossible to completely avoid,” reports PCMag. “Even if you deleted all your accounts and never used them again, they'd still probably be able to harvest data on you.”
These same companies have engineered their products to become essential tools for connecting with other people. They then exploit our personal relationships to encourage us to share, like, post, and comment—in other words, to generate content that produces more and more data about us they can capture and use in a never-ending cycle. Meanwhile, they work to make their products as addictive as possible, literally using the science of addiction to keep us glued to our screens so they can keep pumping us for data.
Data capitalists then combine the data they harvest directly with data they get from third parties to form a complete profile of us as individuals. And we can’t stop it! Just check out this gem of a privacy policy clause from—of all things—a school yearbook company.
Please note that we may combine information that we collect from you and about you (including automatically-collected information) with information we obtain about you from our affiliates and/or non-affiliated third parties, and use such combined information in accordance with this Policy.
Dare so much as to buy a yearbook and you become part of the bonanza of data the corporate oppressors use to track and try to control us.
So yes…we’re fighting against giants in the dark.
FORCE #2: WE HAVE TO USE THE INTERNET FOR ROUTINE TASKS
It’s now nearly impossible to do banking, buy concert tickets, plan a trip, pay bills, or take care of many other common tasks without going online.
FORCE #3: EVEN WHEN WE’RE OFFLINE, WE’RE ONLINE
Surveillance capitalists don’t track you only when you’re sitting at your laptop or scrolling on your phone. When you buy running shoes from an athletic store, for example, the transaction—including what you bought, how you paid, and your demographic details—ends up in a database somewhere in the cloud. When you visit your doctor, the details of the appointment are, you guessed it, logged into an online database.
FORCE #4: IT’S LIKE TRYING TO HOLD BACK THE TIDE
Even if you were to wipe the slate clean, it would fill up again before you managed to shut your laptop.
For example, say you somehow manage to magically reclaim every drop of your data…and then your kid joins a sports team. The team requires parents to communicate via an app, upload medical forms to a portal, and use yet another platform to volunteer at the concession stand. Suddenly, three more businesses have your info, along with the third-party services they share your details with.
FORCE #5: WE NEVER KNOW IF OUR EFFORTS ARE WORKING
One of the hallmarks of surveillance capitalism is that the businesses know what data they’re collecting from us, who they’re sharing it with, and how they’re using it—but we are kept in the dark.
This means you might, say, ask YouTube to stop tracking your viewing history, and they’ll say they’ve stopped. But you’ll never really know if it’s true, or what other types of tracking they may be doing that you don’t have control over.
For example, in 2023, Gizmodo reported that Apple was harvesting data about its users even after they selected the iPhone privacy setting to “disable the sharing of device analytics altogether.” Apple later admitted they collected anonymized data for advertising purposes, which has resulted in at least a dozen class-action lawsuits against the company.
FORCE #6: MANY OF US MAKE A LIVING BY BEING VISIBLE
Finally, if you’re a public figure or business owner of any kind, you’ll probably never be able to disengage altogether. Whether you’re a member of the school board, a bakery owner, or a stand-up comedian, details about you will appear on review sites, booking sites, order sites, and even your state business authority’s website…at least if you want to keep your job.
In other words, it’s difficult to stay offline if your livelihood depends on your being visible online. I spent over two decades as an entrepreneur. I marketed on social media, did interviews with the press, joined business groups online, was a guest on podcasts, and even had my face and name on a screen in Times Square. I can never get all the toothpaste back in the tube now that I want to scale back.
All that said, disengaging as much as we can is still a worthwhile endeavor. Small efforts, when compounded by thousands or millions of people, add up—and we reap personal benefits by reclaiming the life energy the broligarchy has taken from us.
PART 2: DISENGAGE BY...RECLAIMING YOUR DATA
Our data is one of the most nourishing possible substances for Big Tech and the broligarchy that runs it. Everything we do, everywhere we go, our spending, income, grades, sexual preferences, medical information—our lives are there to be consumed, chewed up, and spit out for commercial profit.
I have a friend who vigilantly protected their data from the first moment they went online decades ago. Their real name appears in only two places on the entire internet, and those instances are obscured by the hundreds of other people who share my friend’s name (and who weren’t as careful with their data).
Sadly, I doubt any of us can manage this feat if we’re starting from scratch right now. But there are still ways to reclaim some of our data from the invasive, exploitative companies that are using it to thrive and grow.
CHAPTER 4: PAY ATTENTION TO PRIVACY POLICIES
How likely are you to wade through pages and pages of a privacy notice before clicking Accept? “Only about one-in-five adults overall say they always (9%) or often (13%) read a company’s privacy policy before agreeing to it,” according to Pew Research. “Some 38% of all adults maintain they sometimes read such policies, but 36% say they never read a company’s privacy policy before agreeing to it.”
This makes sense, considering how many privacy policies we’re asked to sign, how long and confusing they are, and how they often bind you to the privacy policies of third parties—which you’re expected to also read!
You’ll just have to accept the terms anyway if you want to access the content or website or service…so why bother?
To be totally transparent, I tried reading every privacy policy over the course of a year or so, and found it to be too much effort for the payoff.
Despite this, making a habit of at least skimming privacy policies can be worthwhile. Those policies inform you of your rights, which you can then exercise; for example, an app’s privacy policy may tell you how to opt out of sharing your data with third parties, or give you an email address to write to in order to request data deletion.
If a company’s privacy policy is way out of line, voice your concerns to the responsible party; many policies offer an email for correspondence. The more of us who speak up, the more likely it will make a difference.
CHAPTER 5: CONTROL YOUR ONLINE ACCOUNTS
This part can be fairly time consuming, but it’s also easy to do bit by bit during spare moments of time. Waiting for a Zoom meeting to start? Sitting in a waiting room? Bored during an intermission? These are perfect times to chip away at the project.
I started by creating a spreadsheet where I logged every business I could think of that might have my data—from stores and apps to utility companies and credit card providers.
EXTRA CREDIT
Download my Excel template for free to use on your computer or upload to a cloud-based spreadsheet platform. You’ll find separate tabbed sheets for accounts, people-search sites and data brokers, bios, and reviews; there’s more on all these later in the book. I pre-populated the sheets with common examples, including over 80 people-search sites and brokers. Hover over cells that are marked with a triangle in the corner for explanations/instructions.
A good way to ferret out all the companies storing and sharing your personal data is to look through whatever platform you use for storing your passwords, such as Google Password Manager. This surfaced an incredible number of accounts I had forgotten all about.
Be sure to also check your bank and credit card transactions to dig up businesses that have your info; for example, you may be reminded that you have a Chewy subscription for your pet’s food, or notice that your state's toll authority charged you to refill your car’s toll pass.
When you’re brainstorming the list of all the places your data may be stored, also consider:
The apps on your phone and other devices
Newsletters you’ve signed up for
Long-forgotten email addresses at Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.
Loyalty programs you belong to
Online forums you participate in
Your credit cards
Banks where you hold accounts
All the apps on your TV, such as Netflix or AppleTV
Social media sites like YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok
Work-related apps and websites like Slack, Zoom, and Trello
Smart TVs, refrigerators, cameras, doorbells, thermostats, door locks, cars, etc.
Utilities and services like the gas company and your internet provider
Brick-and-mortar shops you frequent: grocery stores, big-box stores, local shops, and so on
TRY IT NOW
Start making a list!
Once you have a list, decide which subscriptions/ accounts/etc. you want to delete, change, or protect. (Before tackling your social media and smart home products, though, be sure to read Chapter 16: Say Sayonara To Social Media and Chapter 13: Banish Smart Products From Your Spaces to determine whether you'd prefer to get rid of them altogether.)
Where should you start? The easiest place to begin is with accounts you no longer use. For example, maybe you signed up for a website to get a 10% discount on a single purchase three years ago, and you don’t plan to shop there again. (Or you decide you’ll make future purchases using a guest account instead.) These accounts are prime candidates for closing.
STEP 1: REQUEST DATA DELETION
Before closing an account altogether, check out the site’s privacy policy to find out whether and how you can request that your data be deleted. Not all businesses will erase your data when you close your account! If that’s the case, even though they won’t be able to collect first-party data on you in the future, they’ll still retain your information in their database.
If an account allows for data deletion, follow the instructions in their privacy policy to do so.
TRY IT NOW
Is there an account you can try this with?
STEP 2: IF THAT DOESN’T WORK, POISON YOUR DATA
Some businesses will refuse to delete your data if you don’t live in a state or country with consumer privacy protection laws in place. In those cases, log in, delete whatever details are not required, and then randomize the rest of the data—for example, putting in a fake name, throwaway email address, and burner phone number.
Then change your password to a long, random string of characters, log out, and be done with it. Doing this won’t erase details on your past activities, but it may be the best solution in this situation.
STEP 3: CLOSE THE ACCOUNT
Once your data is deleted (or poisoned), close the account. If the company makes it difficult to figure out how to do so, look up “how to delete [company name] account.” Often you’ll find instructional articles or videos created by people who have figured it out.
STEP 4: CHANGE YOUR NAME
I’m not telling you to legally change your name, but to choose a pseudonym for accounts you want to keep open that don’t really need to know your name. Think of a name that’s close enough to your real one that mail addressed to it arrives in your mailbox without any problems.
For example, if your name is Alexander McAndrews, try Lex Andrews. Tonya Jamison may become Tony Jameson. Or if you are married and kept your maiden name, use your spouse’s last name instead...especially if their last name is more common than yours.
The hope is that over time, more data will be attached to the fake name than the real one. Alexander McAndrews doesn’t read gardening content, search for eczema cures on Google, and belong to a coffee-of-the-month club…Lex Andrews does!
At the very least, this tactic will throw a bit of sand into surveillance capitalists’ gears.
CHAPTER 6: BASH THE BROKERS
When I say your data is for sale, it’s not a metaphor. I mean it literally. According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center:
Thousands of data brokers in the United States buy, aggregate, disclose, and sell billions of data elements on Americans with virtually no oversight. As the data broker industry proliferates, companies have enormous financial incentives to collect consumers’ personal data, while data brokers have little financial incentive to protect consumer data.
Thankfully, many broker databases let you remove your data—and once you put some of the other suggestions from this guide into action, the brokers will have less and less of your information to collect and sell.
BASH THE BROKERS BY…REMOVING YOUR INFO FROM PEOPLE-SEARCH SITES
You search for an old friend online and see ads promising to show you their address, income, and criminal record. These are called “people-finder” or “people-search” sites, and they scrape and share your data for profit—including your property history, voting records, age, job history, contact info, and relatives’ names.
While these sites let you opt out, the bad news is that you need to stay on top of it because over time they’ll rescrape and repost your data. Thankfully, the more you delete and conceal your info online, the less the people-finder sites will have to post.
DIY THE DELETION
A friend of mine made a project of opting out of a handful of people-finder sites at a time; when she’s done with the list, she circles back to the top and starts over. This is a good way to approach this task without spending a dime.
Yael Grauer seconds the DIY idea in a report she co-wrote for Consumer Reports called “Data Defense: Evaluating People-Search Site Removal Services.” The report notes that even the most effective paid service is less effective than manually opting out of these sites.
If you decide to go the DIY route, keep in mind that some people-search sites require you to be a paid subscriber to access your profile...which you need to do in order to opt out. In these few cases, I use a masked credit card to sign up for a trial or pay for a monthly subscription, then cancel right away. (Even if the site attempts to keep charging me, it can’t because I only loaded the card with enough money for one month.)
Other sites ask you to upload your ID. Use ThisPersonDoesNotExist to generate a fake headshot to cover your real photo; IntelTechniques reports that most sites don’t examine the photo.
MAKE IT EASIER BY TACKLING THE TOP TEN
According to IntelTechniques, many smaller people-search companies get their data from:
Spokeo [opt out here]
Mylife [opt out here]
Radaris [opt out here]
Whitepages [opt out here]
Intelius [opt out here]
BeenVerified [opt out here]
Infotracer [opt out here]
TruePeopleSearch [opt out here]
Also included in this list are LexisNexis and Acxiom, which I address below.
If you start with this group and wait a week or so, you may find that your personal info has disappeared from some of the smaller sites as well.
TRADE MONEY FOR TIME
If you’re low on time and have some cash to throw at the problem, services like DeleteMe (which I have used and liked) will handle this for you on a quarterly basis and send you reports with the results. DeleteMe costs $129 per year, with discounts for more people and additional years, and targets over 50 top data broker sites. The service will also handle one-off requests if you find your info on a site they don’t normally tackle.
DeleteMe also offers masked emails, credit cards, and phone numbers (more on those later).
Here are similar services to check out:
Incogni costs $89.88 per year and promises to remove your data from over 200 sites.
Reputation Defender provides additional reputation services such as correcting inaccurate search engine results. They ask potential customers to call them for a personalized price quote, which makes me think they’re probably pretty pricy.
EasyOptOuts is only $19.99 per year and claims to opt you out of over 160 sites.
Privacy Pros offers a service for $299.99 per year that removes your info from over 300 sites and then asks Google to remove your profile links as they’re taken down. (Or DIY that last part! See Chapter 7: Surf In Secret for a how-to.)
There are several other services providing pretty much the same thing; just search for “data broker opt-out services.” Even if you don’t want to use one of these, many of them offer free guides and other resources for DIYers.
Keep in mind that these services don’t catch every single people-finder site—there are a lot of them, and they tend to multiply and merge—so I supplemented DeleteMe’s efforts by opting out manually from additional sites I found on Yael Grauer’s incredible list, which includes opt-out instructions for each site. Michael Bazzell’s book Extreme Privacy also includes a long, long list of these sites, and there’s a good list of opt-out links on the Selvan Soft Blog.
BEWARE
You may hear about the people-finder opt-out service OneRep. In March 2024, it was discovered that the CEO of OneRep also founded dozens of people-search firms—meaning they are potentially selling your info on one end and then charging you to remove it on the other. I recommend avoiding OneRep, especially since there are so many other services out there.
BASH THE BROKERS BY…BEGINNING WITH THE BADDEST
The people-search sites look piddly when compared with gigantic data brokers that specialize in compiling and selling your data. These businesses collect and share information on everything from your income and purchasing habits to your school grades and date of birth.
Why does size matter? It’s because the bigger the databases, the bigger the breach. For example, in 2018, it was discovered that Exactis—a now-defunct data warehouse of more than 3.5 billion records used by digital marketers—had 340 million records sitting on a publicly accessible server.
So it’s important to opt out of these companies’ databases not only because they sell your private information far and wide, but because they can expose tons of your personal data.
Some of the paid opt-out services we talked about earlier remove your info from large data brokers as well as people-finder sites. But if yours doesn’t, or if you don’t want to pay at all, it’s easy to hit the biggest brokers yourself. Keep in mind, however, that a broker may refuse to delete your info if you’re not in a state or country with consumer privacy protection laws in place; if this happens you may need to go try something else, such as asking them to not share your info.
Here’s how to opt out of the most massive data brokers. Be sure to opt out your family members as well!
TRY THIS NOW
Opt out of these brokers' lists!
HOW TO OPT OUT OF ACXIOM
Acxiom is a data collection and audience identification company that provides marketers everything from your relationship status to your purchase habits.
Opt out, request data deletion, or request access to your data by filling out this form.
HOW TO OPT OUT OF EPSILON
Epsilon is a data-driven marketing company. In 2011, hackers stole 250 million records from 75 of Epsilon’s clients.
Exercise your privacy rights with Epsilon by filling out this form or (in the U.S.) calling 866-267-3861.
HOW TO OPT OUT OF ORACLE
As of September 30, 2024, Oracle is no longer in business. If you have any questions, contact oracleadvertising-inquiries_mb@oracle.com.
HOW TO OPT OUT OF LEXISNEXIS
LexisNexis collects billions of records, including data from 1.5 billion bankruptcy records.
Opt out of LexisNexis by filling out this form. You will receive an email or postal mailing (your choice) with additional information or instructions.
HOW TO OPT OUT OF NIELSEN
Nielsen provides survey-based data from more than 90 million households.
Opt out of Nielsen by entering your email address into this form. If they have any information associated with the email, they’ll delete all the data from their records. Enter every email address you have just to be sure all your data is deleted.
HOW TO OPT OUT OF CORELOGIC
CoreLogic provides financial, property, and consumer information, analytics, and business intelligence.
To opt out, send an email to privacy@corelogic.com. They don’t provide any info on what to email them, so be sure to include your name, email, and address, and request they delete your data and cease sharing your information with third parties. (It sounds like they may not comply with deletion if you aren’t in a protected state, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.)
HOW TO OPT OUT OF FOURSQUARE
This one is a little bit of an outlier, but I thought it was worth mentioning. Foursquare helps marketers target customers using real-time location data—meaning, in short, they use technology that can track your phone so marketers can push ads to your device whenever you’re near their location.
To opt out of Foursquare, the company requires you to enter your iPhone’s iOS Advertising Identifier (IDFA) or Android phone’s Android Advertising Identifier into this form.
For Android users, the process is simple: To find your Android ID, just open up the Google Settings app and go to Ads. Your ID should be visible at the bottom of the Ads page.
An Apple user? As of iOS 14, you have no way to access your IDFA without using a third-party app. If you want to take a chance, here’s a list of IDFA-revealing apps.
However, when Apple hid the IDFA, it also introduced a new privacy feature called App Tracking Transparency that requires apps to obtain explicit user permission before accessing the identifier.
It seems pretty sneaky for Foursquare to require you to enter an ID you literally can’t access if you want to opt out.
Making sure your IDFA is set to private on your Apple devices should keep them out without you having to dig for your ID. If you are on an OS earlier than iOS 14, go to Settings, navigate to Privacy, select Advertising, and set your IDFA to private. For iOS 14, Apple requires apps to ask for a user’s permission to track them the first time they open the program. Disable and deny all these requests by going to Settings, Privacy & Security, then Tracking, and turn off “Allow apps to request and track.”
BASH THE BROKERS BY…LEAVING THE LISTS
People-finder sites and giant data brokers aren’t the only way your private information is sold and used. Here’s how to get your name removed from postal lists, telemarketing lists, and more.
HOW TO REMOVE YOUR NAME FROM POSTAL MAIL LISTS
Direct mail firms bristle at the term “junk mail.” If it’s personalized and contains a useful offer, they reason, it’s not junk. But I counter with this: If it gets immediately thrown into the recycling bin, that’s the definition of junk. So here’s how to stop junk mail in its tracks.
Go to the top
The easiest way to get off direct mail lists is to opt out at DMAChoice, the consumer preferences service run by the Direct Marketing Association. It costs $7 to remove up to three household members’ info for 10 years. (When I wrote the first version of this guide in 2023, it was $5 for five household members.)
TRY THIS NOW
Got $7? Get it done!
Return to sender
Some organizations—such as companies you’ve done business with in the past and charities—aren’t required to remove you from their lists. But you don’t have to accept every piece of mail that finds its way into your mailbox.
According to the USPS, unless a piece of mail was sent registered, certified, or the like, you can simply write “Refused” on it and put it back in the box for the mail deliverer to pick up.
If the sender is smart, they’ll remove you from their mailing list. This process will probably be slow, but over time it should make an impact.
BEWARE
My mail deliverer told me they are not allowed to accept “Refused” or “Return to Sender” mail that’s addressed to “Current Resident” or “Your Name or Current Resident.”
According to the USPS, unless a piece of mail was sent registered, certified, or the like, you can simply write “Refused” on it and put it back in the box for the mail deliverer to pick up.
If the sender is smart, they’ll remove you from their mailing list. This process will probably be slow, but over time it should make an impact.
Another easy (but also slow) tactic is to write “Remove me from your mailing list” on the offer, stick it into the pre-paid reply envelope you’ll find in some direct mail packages, and send it right back to them.
Be proactive
Still getting junk? You could also use PaperKarma’s mailer directory to search for instructions on how to stop the worst direct-mail offenders. The directory is not comprehensive, but it does include major mailers like AARP and MasterCard.
HOW TO REMOVE YOUR NAME FROM PRESCREENED CREDIT OFFER LISTS
The companies that generate your credit score—Experian, TransUnion, Innovis, and Equifax—do more than influence whether how much credit you get. They also sell your data to businesses that target you with financial offers.
OptOutPrescreen.com is “the official Consumer Credit Reporting Industry website to accept and process requests from consumers to Opt-In or Opt-Out of firm offers of credit or insurance.”
TRY THIS NOW
Opting out online takes mere seconds!
Opt out either for five years (by opting out online) or permanently (by opting out via post), and you’ll no longer be included in “firm offer lists” provided by these four consumer credit reporting companies.
HOW TO REMOVE YOUR NAME FROM VALPAK COUPON LISTS
If you’re tired of getting those packs of (mostly useless) coupons in your mailbox, unsubscribe here.
HOW TO REMOVE YOUR NAME FROM ALL POSTAL MAIL LISTS
If you prefer to have someone else handle all your postal mail opt-outs, try PaperKarma—an app that not only unsubscribes you from general direct mail lists, but also removes your name from the lists of charities, local mailers, catalogs, credit and insurance companies, and more.
The service costs $24.99 per year. If you go this route, ignore the advice above for removing yourself from various postal lists…this app will do it for you.
HOW TO REMOVE YOUR NAME FROM EMAIL LISTS
The DMA also runs the fast and free Email Preferences service: just enter up to three email addresses, and they’ll be made available to all advertisers that use the service to clean its lists.
TRY THIS NOW
Got a few seconds to spare? Then do this!
This won’t stop spam, as actual spammers notoriously don’t care if you want to receive their crap. But it’s a start.
HOW TO REMOVE YOUR NAME FROM TELEMARKETING LISTS
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission runs a national Do Not Call Registry. It’s free and will get you off the sales lists of “real companies.” In other words, it won’t protect you from scammers, who aren’t interested in your calling preferences.
BASH THE BROKERS BY…SPREADING DISINFORMATION
No, I don’t mean posting misleading political memes on Facebook. I mean throwing red herrings into data scrapers’ databases...in other words, poisoning your data. I got this idea from Michael Bazzell’s book Extreme Privacy, and have been doing it off and on when I’m bored and have time to spare.
Two things to try:
Fill out forms or order items with your real address and phone number but an alias name. When the company invariably sells your info, it now looks like someone else lives at your address. (Even better if you manage to remove your real name from the lists; but even if you don’t, you now have a roommate who doesn’t exist.)
Fill out forms or order items with your real name but a fake address, email, and phone number. Bazzell offers a lot of detail on how to create your alias information without accidentally using a real person’s info.
This tactic is especially useful if you have an unusual name, since you’re easier to find; creating “more” of yourself can throw marketers and others off your trail.
Enhance the effect by posting the alias contact details on your social media profiles and websites, uploading a CV to resume sites, etc.
This works great with all those “freebie” and “make money from surveys” sites that ask for your race, religion, product preferences, and more. I filled out an eight-page survey saying I listen to techno, enjoy MMA, go fishing regularly, and have four cats.
Chances are, within a few months you’ll find your alias information propagating onto the people-finder lists.
EXTRA CREDIT
To find out what the internet knows about you, both before and after a disinformation campaign, ask ChatGPT. You’ll need to create an account to get the best results, so use a masked email address—and delete your data and your account when you’re finished with it.
Ask ChatGPT where you live, whatyou look like, etc., and request the sources of any information it brings up; this may help you uncover more places to remove your data, take down photos, etc.
CHAPTER 7: SURF IN SECRET
Disengaging from the internet completely is a pipe dream for most of us. If you can’t (or don’t want to) stop surfing the internet altogether, take steps to ensure that as little of your data as possible is being leaked to data brokers, scammers, and marketers...and that you’re providing the minimum amount of free labor to Big Tech.
SURF IN SECRET BY...REWRITING YOUR LIFE STORY
You’ve created a professional bio for your job or business, or maybe you’ve filled out the profile sections on hobby sites, special-interest websites, online communities, and so on. And now the innocent act of sharing information about your life is coming back to bite you in the butt—because it’s been scraped, harvested, and leaked. Here’s how to rein your bio back in.
STEP 1: EDIT (OR DELETE) YOUR BIOS
Plug your name into a search engine to see what profiles and bios pop up. Then log in to the sites as needed to delete your information. (Or seed them with disinformation, as we discussed above.)
It’s not always easy. For example, editing my “Knowledge Page” on Google was literally impossible. My correspondence with customer service went nowhere, and Google switched my bio to one I used years ago and started displaying an incorrect birth year. I’d be happier if I could control the bio more directly, but will have to be OK with them sharing outdated, incorrect information.
STEP 2: CONTROL YOUR DATA ON SITES YOU DON'T CONTROL
What if information about you appears on websites you have no control over? Sometimes, all you have to do is ask nicely that your details be removed or updated.
As a former business owner, I spilled details about my life in bios and interviews everywhere from print magazines to podcasts. I contacted blogs I guested for as long as two decades ago to ask them to change my online bio to a more generic, less personal version, which I sent along with my request. Most of them did.
I also asked website owners to remove interviews from my past life as a business owner—but only if the interviews were outdated or contained more personal information than I'm now comfortable with sharing. I understood I was asking people to take time out of their day to delve into their website and remove information I previously agreed to have there, so I tried to keep the requests to a minimum (and was very polite about it).
For example, I didn’t bother going after a case study an old client included me in. The case study is fairly up to date, it shares valuable information, and it isn’t overly personal. While I would rather have the case study gone, it’s not important enough for me to bother the website owner about.
(As a side note, I've been pleasantly surprised at how many people complied with my requests)
STEP 3: ASK GOOGLE TO STOP SERVING UP YOUR OLD INFO
So you’ve gotten your bios removed or edited. But Google still shows the old info when you do a search!
Google Search periodically reindexes sites to ensure the search engine has the freshest information. Speed this up by using this link to ask Google to remove or reindex outdated content. (You do need to have a Google account for this.) Check back later to see if your request has been approved or denied.
I used this method to ask Google to reindex the contact page on my site when I switched to a masked email address, and also to remove old results from a business I no longer own.
(DuckDuckGo uses Bing and Yahoo, among other services, to help provide search results—so information deleted from these search engines will likely disappear from DuckDuckGo as well.)
SURF IN SECRET BY...CONTROLLING YOUR (ACTUAL) IMAGE
If you’re a typical internet user, your photo is everywhere. Your company’s “About Our Staff” page. Facebook. Google’s image search. And so much more.
The bad news: These photos are being used to train AI in facial recognition, which may later be used to surveil us.
According to NBC News:
Facial recognition can log you into your iPhone, track criminals through crowds and identify loyal customers in stores.
The technology—which is imperfect but improving rapidly—is based on algorithms that learn how to recognize human faces and the hundreds of ways in which each one is unique.
To do this well, the algorithms must be fed hundreds of thousands of images of a diverse array of faces. Increasingly, those photos are coming from the internet, where they’re swept up by the millions without the knowledge of the people who posted them, categorized by age, gender, skin tone and dozens of other metrics, and shared with researchers at universities and companies.
If this technology doesn’t scare you, consider this: Anyone can surreptitiously snap a photo of you, upload it to any number of free services, and find your social media profiles and other information about you. Anyone can find out you were involved in a protest, even if you were wearing a hat or glasses. Someone could use your Instagram selfie to figure out where you live.
Sure, these systems are also used by law enforcement to protect innocent people...but being on the right side of the law doesn’t mean you’re immune from being targeted by an online posse you somehow pissed off.
You may not want to (or be able to) change or delete some of your online photos. Your company might not be cool with you having a blank square as your professional headshot, and you’re not allowed to remove photos from your friends’ Instagram accounts. For safety reasons, a group that meets up in person may require that your profile have a real photo before they’ll let you join. You’ll also need a professional headshot on LinkedIn if you’re looking for a job.
But in many cases, it’s either simple to change your photo or the company or website doesn’t need to have it at all. (A doctor’s office recently asked me to add a photo of myself to their portal. Why?) Tell them no…and if they insist, just upload a random image.
Here are some ideas for controlling your image.
GET CREATIVE
Have some fun with it! I changed one photo of me to a photo taken during a costume party. (Even PimEyes—see the box below for more on them—didn’t bring up any results from this photo.) On other sites, I swapped out my photo for random photos or artwork.
ASK NICELY
If your photo is on a website you don’t control, ask the site owner if they’d be willing to take it down. Sometimes it’s a simple oversight, like an old employer who forgot to remove you from their “About Our Employees” page.
GET THE LAW ON YOUR SIDE
Google will remove photos of you that are inappropriate or harassing. There’s a special process to follow for this situation, and the images must meet three criteria:
The imagery shows you (or the individual you're representing) nude, in a sexual act, or in an intimate state.
You (or the individual you're representing) didn't consent to the imagery or the act and it was made publicly available OR the imagery was made available online without your consent.
You are not currently being paid for this content online or elsewhere.
Here’s where to request the removal of images meeting these criteria.
If the images don’t meet those criteria, you may still be able to get them removed by making a request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to remove unlawful material.
OPT OUT OF SPY SERVICES
Two platforms that have many of us concerned are Clearview AI and PimEyes, facial recognition search engines that are scarily accurate.
I uploaded to PimEyes a recent photo of myself that exists only on my phone, and the search engine pulled up photos of me going back at least 10 years, including a photo of myself with my young child at an art studio. Anyone who finds the photo can narrow down where I live since the studio website includes their address.
Luckily, you can opt out. You’ll be required to upload an image of your face plus an anonymized scan of an ID.
Before requesting removal, it may be worth it to pay for a month’s worth of PimEyes’ advanced service to get the actual URLs of the photos it turns up in order to request removal from those sites if possible.
ASK FRIENDS TO NOT SHARE OR TAG YOUR IMAGE ON SOCIAL MEDIA
You can be extra careful about your online image...and have it all wrecked when a well-meaning relative tags you in a group photo on Facebook.
I have at least two friends who make a point of asking during gatherings that no one post photos of them online, and as far as I can tell, they’ve never experienced any pushback. You might ask that, at a minimum, friends and family don’t tag you in the photos they post.
JUST SAY NO TO THE TSA
When an organization or corporation asks for your biometric information, just say no.
At the airport TSA booths at the security check-in, there are signs stating that you may opt out of their scans.
From my searches on the topic, I can see that many people are afraid to exercise this right. But most people who do opt out never experience any pushback to a polite “I’d like to opt myself [and my family, if applicable] out of the biometric scan.”
I did have one TSA agent tell me the images are not stored, but that’s only a half truth: Some images are stored for training purposes. Not only that, there’s no stopping them from eventually deciding to store (or share) this information.
Or they may leak it. In 2019, 184,000 traveler images were stolen in a data breach when “U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not adequately safeguard sensitive data on an unencrypted device used during its facial recognition technology pilot,” according to the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency.
To make things worse, a 2019 study showed that Asian and African American people were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than white men by facial recognition technology.
EXTRA CREDIT
If you’re privileged enough to be unafraid to exercise your right to opt out of TSA scans, this tiny act of resistance can help those who are not. While it’s doubtful that the small percentage of travelers who opt out are going to sway TSA policy, it’s easy to do—and the person behind you in line may be emboldened to opt out themselves.
STRIP METADATA FROM YOUR IMAGES
If you do post photos online, you might want to strip out the metadata first. Metadata is information embedded within the file that indicates what kind of camera you used, what editing features you used, the time and date you took the photo, and even the coordinates of the location where you took the photo.
Why is this a problem? According to PrivacySavvy:
[People] could use it to stalk and harass you online and offline, while others could mount social engineering and phishing campaigns to steal your identity. While some companies, such as Instagram, have tried to erase metadata from publicly available photos, the data is still stored in their servers, and they can use it for their own benefit. Also, hackers can breach their servers and access your data, compromising your privacy.
Remove metadata manually on MacOS using one of these methods:
Open the file in Preview, save it as a PDF, then open and save the PDF as a jpeg. Crop as needed.
Take a screenshot of the photo, crop as needed.
Download the free app Photo Anonymizator. To process the photo, right-click on the filename and select Open With…Photo Anonymizator.
Download the free, open source app ImageOptim. Open the app, drag and drop in the photo file, and click Anonymize. You can even use the settings to have the app automatically anonymize the file name and choose a new creation date.
I have tried all of these methods. Photo Anonymizator is the easiest, but ImageOptim offers more features. Changing the file type and taking a screenshots are a minor pain in the butt, but they don’t require an app.
Remove metadata manually on Windows using these instructions:
Click the Details tab.
Click the Remove Properties and Personal Information link.
Select Create a copy with possible properties erased.
Click the OK button.
TRY THIS NOW
Strip the metadata off of one photo!
Android and Apple phones don’t offer a way to do this. Thankfully, however, there are apps that can quickly delete or change photo metadata on your computer or phone, often in bulk:
For Android: EXIF Editor (Free)
For iOS: EXIF Metadata (Free
For Windows: Exif purge (Free)
For MacOS: Photos EXIF Editor ($3.99)
Corporations like Meta (owner of Instagram) have enough of our data already. Stripping the metadata from your images keeps them from deriving even more information from your online activity.
SURF IN SECRET BY...USING A VPN
VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. In short, it’s an encrypted “tunnel” between you and the VPN’s servers. All your internet activity is routed through the tunnel, and even your own ISP can’t see it. When you use a VPN, no one can see your IP address—the string of numbers that identifies your device. Instead, they see the IP address of the server your traffic is being routed through.
VPNs are great not only for minimizing how much you’re tracked and the amount of data being collected about you—they also let you use free wi-fi hotspots safely.
VPNs don’t guarantee anonymity, but they do close off one big point of access to your info. Advertisers, for example, can still track you with trackers and cookies, even by recognizing the unique setup of your browser. (More on this later.)
I use the VPN bundled with my ProtonMail subscription (for more info on Proton, see Chapter 21: Say Goodbye To Google). This VPN was rated Best Open Source VPN for 2025 by CNET. Others in the top include:
ExpressVPN (Best VPN Service Overall)
NordVPN (Best for Speed)
Surfshark (Best Cheap VPN)
Mullvad (Best Privacy VPN)
Prices vary depending on the service and how many months you’re willing to commit to it. In addition, many VPN companies run deals, such as for Black Friday. I’ve seen prices ranging from $1.99/month to $12.99/month.
TRY THIS NOW
Does DNSleaktest show your current location? (See below.)
Wondering if your VPN is really concealing your location? Visit DNSleaktest.com and the site will instantly display the IP address and city you appear to be coming from. If it’s your actual IP address and city, you know your VPN isn’t working.
BEWARE
Free VPNs exist, but at best they will restrict data, speed, and features—and at worst they may make their money by selling your data, hitting you with ads, or even installing malware on your computer. Not that they’re the only danger: Even some of the paid VPNs are fakes meant to steal our money, bandwidth, or data. To make sure you’re avoiding scam VPNs, check out this VPN Warning List from the digital privacy advocacy group RestorePrivacy.
SURF IN SECRET BY...THROWING OUT THE COOKIES
Cookies are bits of data websites store on your computer so that the next time you visit, the website will remember you.
First-party cookies are meant to make your browsing experience better—for example, the website will remember your preferences—and the data remains on the website you’re using. Third-party cookies, however, transmit your data to outside businesses so they can track and advertise to you. (That’s why some ads seem to “follow” you around the web.)
Here’s how to keep cookies from tracking you and sharing your data. Before you follow any of these instructions, first consider whether you’d prefer to replace your current browser with a privacy-oriented one; it would be a waste of time to redo all your settings on, say, Chrome, only to switch to a cookie-killing browser later.
OPTION 1: REFUSE COOKIES
An easy way to put the kibosh on third-party cookies is to simply not allow them. Some websites will display a pop-up or slide-in asking if it’s OK for them to use cookies. Choose “necessary cookies only” to allow the website to use only the cookies that enhance your browsing experience, while disallowing third-party cookies.
OPTION 2: OPT OUT OF COOKIES ON A CASE-BY-CASE BASIS
If a website doesn’t show a pop-up allowing you to decline cookies, check the website’s cookie policy, which is sometimes rolled into its privacy policy. This document may offer information on whether (and how) you can opt out of cookies.
Some websites have a handy “Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information” link at the bottom of the page to let you quickly opt out of cookies.
OPTION 3: DISABLE ALL COOKIES
It’s also possible to disable cookies in your browser altogether. This has the disadvantage of also rejecting the cookies that make websites work. You’ll need to
re-log into every service you use each time you use it, and may need to occasionally turn cookies on to use all of a website’s features.
Here’s how to reject cookies in the most popular browsers. You usually need to quit and restart your browser for the changes to take effect. These instructions are for the browser you use on your computer, not your other devices; the steps for deactivating cookies from your preferred browser app may be different.
How to disable cookies in Chrome
At the top right in your Chrome browser, select More, then Settings.
Select Privacy and security, then Third-party cookies.
Select Block third-party cookies.
How to disable cookies in Firefox
In the Menu bar at the top of the screen, click Firefox and then select Preferences or Settings.
Select Privacy & Security.
In the Enhanced Tracking Protection section, select Custom and then Cookies.
Use the drop-down menu to choose the type of cookies to block.
Close the Settings page. Any changes you've made will automatically be saved.
How to disable cookies in Safari
Go to Settings
Go to Advanced.
Check the box Block all cookies.
How to disable cookies in Microsoft Edge
Select Settings and more in the upper right corner of your browser window.
Select Settings then Cookies and site permissions.
Select Manage and delete cookies and site data and disable Allow sites to save and read cookie data (recommended) to block all cookies.
When you disable cookies in your browser, future attempts to place cookies on your computer will be blocked.
OPTION 4: LET BROWSER EXTENSIONS DO THE WORK
An extension—sometimes also called an add-on or a plug-in—is software that adds features to your browser; for example, you may be familiar with the Honey x PayPal extension, which searches for promo codes when you’re about to pay for your order in an online store. Extensions are typically easy to install, and once you’ve done it, they’ll work for you seamlessly in the background.
Use a free tracker-blocking browser extension and you’ll be amazed at how many cookies and other trackers it intercepts every day. I use Privacy Badger, which was created by the nonprofit digital rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation. It’s easy to install and works great. To find a free cookie-crumbling extension for your browser, check out Chapter 18: Annihilate Ads.
EMPTY THE COOKIE JAR
You chose one of the methods above to keep websites from putting cookies on your computer. However, cookies can hang around for a long time, so it’s a good idea to clear out the ones that are already there.
These instructions are for the browsers on your desktop computer and not your mobile devices. Keep in mind that when you clear cookies, you may be logged out of any websites you’re signed in to.
How to clear cookies in Chrome
At the top right in your Chrome browser, click More.
Select Delete browsing data.
Choose a time range, like Last hour or All time.
Select the types of information you want to remove.
Click Delete data.
How to clear cookies in Safari
In Safari, choose Safari.
Select Settings.
Select Privacy.
Click Manage Website Data.
Select websites, then click Remove or Remove All.
How to clear cookies in Microsoft Edge
Go to Settings.
Select Privacy.
Select Clear browsing data.
You can also select Ctrl+Shift+Del or type edge://settings/clearbrowserdata in your address bar to access this function.
The steps for deleting cookies may be different in each browser’s phone app. In all cases, you may need to quit and restart the browser for the changes to take effect.
EXTRA CREDIT
Even more troubling than third-party cookies are supercookies. There are two types, and they’re both difficult to get rid of.
One type of supercookie is a Flash cookie. Check out this guide on removing Flash supercookies from your computer.
The other type is placed on your computer by your Internet Service Provider. The ISP sells the data to third parties—and even worse, they can restore deleted cookies. The only way to block them is to run a VPN on your computer.
SURF IN SECRET BY...FIGURING OUT YOUR FINGERPRINT
Can someone pinpoint you by the unique fonts on your browser, the content filters you use, your screen resolution, your add-ons, or the local time on your device?
With enough data points like these, yes, they can.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation offers a browser fingerprint test called Cover Your Tracks. Just click Test Your Browser and Cover Your Tracks “shows you how trackers see your browser. It provides you with an overview of your browser’s most unique and identifying characteristics.”
TRY THIS NOW
Try Cover Your Tracks and be amazed!
It’s enlightening (and frightening) to see how all your browser data can converge to make you uniquely identifiable.
If you discover you have a unique fingerprint—which you likely will—and this bothers you enough to take action, CyberInsider offers suggestions for mitigating it. I followed the instructions for Firefox and the process was quick.
BEWARE
There are browser add-ons that will spoof your browser, meaning they will show snoopers different metrics than your actual browser set-up. For example, if you’re on Safari using a MacBook Pro, the add-on might instead indicate that you’re surfing on Chrome using a tablet.
But not only do these add-ons break some sites—and I know because I tried one—the spoofed profile you choose might make you even more identifiable.
If you want to try one anyway, CyberInsider recommends finding one that lets you change profiles, like Chameleon for Firefox, and cycling through different profiles at random intervals.
CHAPTER 8: ESCAPE EMAIL TRACKING
Email: We’re either addicted to it, or wish it would go away. Or both!
We’re drawn to it due to the promise of intermittent rewards: Most of the time we get nothing good, but every once in a while we hit the jackpot, such as a job offer, a note from a friend, a deep discount, or a funny photo. That promise keeps us hopeful…and always checking.
The heaviest 25% of email users spend almost nine hours per week on email, according to Microsoft. That’s 19 full days pre year you’re subtracting from your life. Worse, everyone from small-time spammers to our corporate overlords use email to track, target, and harass us.
In Chapter 21: Say Goodbye To Google, we’ll talk about ditching your email provider for a more privacy-forward one. In the meantime, here are some ideas for getting less email—thus decreasing the amount of time you have to spend on it—and protecting your data and privacy.
ESCAPE EMAIL TRACKING BY…INSTALLING PIXEL BLOCKERS
Whenever you open an email sent by a business or marketer, chances are you’re being tracked. How? They embed a one-pixel image at the end of their emails that sends back data on when you opened the email, how many times, and even from what city. They may also track whether you clicked on any links.
This is mostly used for legitimate purposes; for example, a business may want to know which of its emails got the most opens or which links got the most clicks in order to provide better content and offers. Not to mention, some people just like to track whether their emails are being seen.
It sounds fairly harmless, and you may not care if Kohls knows you clicked on a coupon, but a critique from Mike Industries points out some concerning pixel-tracking scenarios:
A stalker ex knowing you opened an email in the morning in California and in the evening in New York, broadcasting the fact that you’re not at home.
A creep sending your child a Minecraft guide they refer to often, in order to track them throughout the year.
An email marketing provider deciding to license data to third parties, including location data and timestamps—and that third party using the data to target you, or even sublicensing the data to other third parties.
If you don’t want information on your whereabouts and online activity shared, you could change your email settings to block external (or remote) images; just open up the settings and dig around for this option. But if you go this route, you would need to click to see any image in an email, such as a photo from a friend.
A more elegant solution is to install a pixel blocker on your browser. This does exactly what it sounds like, and even lets you know when an email attempts to track your actions.
Here are a couple I’ve used and liked:
PixelBlock is a free Chrome and Firefox extension. The best part is the little red eye icon it displays on an email to let you know the extension blocked at least one tracking attempt.
Ugly Email is another free Chrome extension with an eye icon, and it works in much the same way as PixelBlock.
If you use another browser, search for “[Browser Name] pixel blocker” to see what extensions are available. Most extensions will walk you through set-up.
TRY THIS NOW
Install a free pixel blocker!
ESCAPE EMAIL TRACKING BY…CREATING A BURNER EMAIL
Whether you use a free email like Gmail or Yahoo or have an address in your own personal domain, it’s typically easy and free to create additional email addresses to give to businesses and people you have no reason to trust.
ESCAPE EMAIL TRACKING BY…MASKING YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS
A masked (or anonymous) email address hides your information while forwarding emails to your email address. When you send mail through these addresses, the service provider encrypts the email and also hides personally identifiable information like your device name and IP address. Even better, it’s easy to delete a masked address if you start getting spam there—which isn’t so easy with your real email address.
I’ve used two services to create masked email addresses:
DeleteMe, the company I used to remove my family’s info from people-search sites. Masked emails (and phone numbers and credit cards) come with the service, so why not?
Proton, my secure email provider, which also offers masked emails with its paid subscription. Their browser extension will even let you create masked addresses on the fly when you’re confronted with a form asking for your email.
Any service you try will provide information on how to create masked emails.
You can even create a new masked address for every purpose. Both Proton and DeleteMe let you turn off addresses as needed, and there doesn’t seem to be a limit on how many you’re allowed to make.
BEWARE
Using a different email for each login can make a mess of your passwords. Unless you have a password manager like LastPass, 1Password, or Proton Pass, you’ll need some way to store or remember which address you used on what accounts when you sign in.
If you’re likely to change your mind about the whole thing, don’t go overboard creating anonymous addresses. You’ll just have to change them back. Instead, create just a few masked email addresses for various uses.
The idea of using masked emails is not just to protect your personal information, but also to confound Big Tech. I love the idea of a broker having an entry for me with 50 email addresses. If I’m really lucky, maybe all this is causing data brokers to maintain multiple entries with different names and emails, few of which are actually attached to me.
I have no idea if it works that way…but one can hope.
ESCAPE EMAIL TRACKING BY…USING A PRIVACY-FORWARD EMAIL PROVIDER
Instead of, or in addition to, using masked emails, you might want to switch to a secure email provider. Here are some inexpensive and free services:
Proton offers—on the free plan—an email address, up to 10 “hide-my-email” aliases, three calendars, up to 1 GB storage, and more. I was able to quickly import my old emails, contacts, and calendars from Gmail. I pay $14.99/month for more features and two members, but have noticed they occasionally run sales.
Tuta is a “free and secure email service that lets you create an email account with built-in encryption for maximum data protection.” I was told by someone in the know that Tuta is actually more protected than Proton. The free email includes a calendar and 1 GB of storage. Upgrading (€3/month—that’s $3.12 as of February 2025) gets you additional features, such as auto-reply, alias emails, and the ability to use your own domain.
Mailfence offers “No ads, no spams, no trackers, no solicitations, no backdoor,” and state-of-the-art security features. The free version gives you 500 MB of storage for emails and 500 MB for documents. The top tier plan ($3.50/month) will get you more storage, the ability to use a custom domain, and more.
Posteo provides “a secure, ad-free email account powered by 100% green energy” for just €1 ($1.04 as of February 2025) per month.
TRY THIS NOW
Sign up for a free trial with one of these email services!
Many of the secure email providers are based in EU countries, which have stronger privacy protections. These are only a few of the most common ad-free, anti-tracker providers; a quick search for “secure email provider” will bring up many more.
ESCAPE EMAIL TRACKING BY…USING THE “+” TRICK
Create different, custom email addresses in Gmail, Outlook, or MS Exchange by adding a “+” symbol to your address and appending other characters. For example, if your Gmail address is xyzabc@gmail.com you might provide your email for a Nike discount as xyzabc+nike@gmail.com. Emails to this address will still reach you.
If you start getting unwanted mail at this subaddress, set up a filter to automatically delete any emails sent there.
BEWARE
Marketers know this “one simple trick.” It’s trivially easy for them to clean their mailing list to remove the portion after the “+” symbol. So use this tactic only as a last resort if the other ideas here don’t work for you.
CHAPTER 9: PROTECT YOUR PHONE
martphones may be the world’s best tracking devices: They collect our data, share our details, and know everywhere we go. And yet, they’ve become a necessity. Below, you’ll learn how to protect your data, safeguard your privacy, and thwart scam calls.
PROTECT YOUR PHONE BY...GETTING A MASKED NUMBER
Mask your phone number using a service like DeleteMe or MySudo (which charges $.99 per month for one anonymous phone number plus other perks). This lets you generate anonymous numbers that will ring on your real line.
PROTECT YOUR PHONE BY...USING SPAM BLOCKER APPS
Spam blocker apps, such as Robo Shield, Truecaller, and Robokiller, not only block many telemarketers and scammers—some of them, usually in the paid versions, also play an “out of service” recording to encourage the caller to remove you from their list.
Be sure to check the privacy policy before installing; I once uninstalled a spam blocker when I discovered it was sharing my data for marketing purposes.
TRY THIS NOW
Install a spam blocker on your phone!
PROTECT YOUR PHONE BY...TRYING TEMPORARY TEXT NUMBERS
You try to create an account for an online service and they ask for your mobile number to verify your sign-up. If you’re already pretty savvy about protecting your data, you may try a burner Google Voice number or free SMS number site—but you quickly discover that the company asking for your number is more savvy than you, and they reject the anonymous digits.
One solution is veritel.io, an “online service that provides access to physical SIM cards via a virtual interface.” According to the site, “Our primary aim is to offer an alternative to physical SIM cards, enabling users to receive text messages online for various purposes such as verification, activation, and confirmation on various platforms.”
You’re priced by the number, and the price varies depending on the country the number is in and the service you’re looking to sign up for. For example, to get a U.S.-based number to confirm your LinkedIn account, you will pay 76 cents. An Austrian number for use on Google will cost $2.70.
I haven’t tried this service, but my understanding is that these numbers work well to fake out online services/verification systems/etc.—and if the number you purchase doesn’t work, the company refunds your credit so you can try another one.
PROTECT YOUR PHONE BY...HIDING YOUR LOCATION
Investigative reports have shown that your phone’s location data may be for sale. And it’s not just where you shop people are interested in; according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Multiple data brokers have specifically targeted and sold location information tied to reproductive healthcare clinics.”
If you’d rather not have details on your whereabouts gathered and sold for commercial or punitive purposes, it’s important to control your phone’s location tracking.
Here’s how to turn off tracking on your mobile phone (and, for good measure, on your laptop).
EXTRA CREDIT
It’s difficult to know if a stray app is tracking your location—or if your phone manufacturer is simply lying about whether your tracking is on. Not to mention, your phone can be tracked even when it’s off or in airplane mode.
If you’re serious about not being tracked via your mobile phone or laptop, look into purchasing a Faraday pouch. This is a bag that prevents signals from being sent from or received by your device.
Keep in mind if you disable location services completely, you won’t be able to use maps and other apps that rely on location data. If this is a problem, instead turn off location access for individual apps. (After all, why does a game or podcast app need your location?)
HOW TO DISABLE LOCATION TRACKING ON iOS
Go to Settings.
Select Privacy.
Select Location Services.
Turn off location sharing.
HOW TO DISABLE SIGNIFICANT LOCATIONS ON iOS
Open Settings.
Select Privacy & Security.
Select Location Services.
Select System Services.
Select Significant Locations.
Tap Clear History to delete your recorded locations from all your Apple devices using the same Apple ID.
Turn off Significant Locations.
HOW TO DISABLE TRACKING FOR SPECIFIC APPS ON iOS
Go to Settings.
Select Privacy.
Select Location Services.
Choose the apps and services you want to stop sharing with.
Tap the app name, then under Allow Location Access, select Never.
HOW TO DISABLE LOCATION TRACKING ON ANDROID
Swipe down from the top of the screen.
If the location icon is highlighted, tap it to turn it off.
There will be a warning that some apps may not function properly. Confirm by tapping Close.
HOW TO DISABLE TRACKING FOR SPECIFIC APPS ON ANDROID
Swipe down from the top of the screen.
Touch and hold the location icon.
Tap App location permissions.
Find the apps that can use your device’s location.
To change an app’s permissions, tap it and then choose the location access for that app.
HOW TO DISABLE LOCATION TRACKING ON MacOS
Click the Apple menu.
Go to System Settings.
Click Privacy & Security in the sidebar.
Click Location Services.
Turn off Location Services.
HOW TO DISABLE LOCATION TRACKING ON WINDOWS 11
Go to Start.
Select Settings.
Select Privacy & security.
Select Location.
Switch the Let apps access your location setting to Off.
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Disable tracking on your phone or laptop!
While you’re in these settings on your various devices, also look for the option to delete location history. Then do that too!
If you’re afraid to turn off location tracking altogether, keep in mind this is easy to reverse if it starts affecting features and apps you need.
Some apps will keep asking you to restore location permission. If this happens to you, the only solution (besides turning location tracking back on for the app) is to toss the app and get a different one.
PROTECT YOUR PHONE BY...BEING CHOOSY ABOUT APPS
The apps on your phone—especially free ones—collect reams of personal data. According to Surfshark:
Social media apps share secrets, while the food delivery category is a data glutton. Both categories tracked an average of 20 out of 32 possible data types. Shopping (18 types of data), Dating (16 types), and Payments (15 types) round out the top five categories.
And those are the ones that are operating above-board and haven’t been compromised by bad guys. In early 2025, reports Wired, “a hack of location data company Gravy Analytics has revealed which apps are—knowingly or not—being used to collect your information behind the scenes.”
More from the article:
Some of the world’s most popular apps are likely being co-opted by rogue members of the advertising industry to harvest sensitive location data on a massive scale, with that data ending up with a location data company whose subsidiary has previously sold global location data to US law enforcement.
Some of the apps involved included games like Candy Crush and Subway Surfers, transit apps, period-trackers, MyFitnessPal, Tumblr, Yahoo email, Microsoft’s 365 office app, and even religious apps and VPNs. (A good reason to avoid free VPNs!)
It’s scary to think about the types of data we input into apps, which can then collect it, combine it with data from other sources, and share it with third parties far and wide.
Personal finance apps get a sneak peek into our income, debt, and spending patterns. Health trackers know everything from how much we exercise to whether we missed our meds today. Period tracker apps can tell if we’re pregnant or perimenopausal. Diet apps know what we eat and when. Shopping apps can glean all sorts of details about us based on what we buy, where, and when.
The only ways to safely use many apps are to give them false information…or to not use them at all. If there’s an app you can’t do without, check out their privacy policy and be sure to opt out of data sharing wherever possible.
EXTRA CREDIT
Some apps are worse than others when it comes to data-grabbing. Take a look at Mozilla’s Privacy Not Included guide for privacy ratings of various apps, websites, and products.
The only ways to safely use many apps are to give them false information…or to not use them at all. If there’s an app you can’t do without, check out their privacy policy and be sure to opt out of data sharing wherever possible.
PROTECT YOUR PHONE BY...BLOCKING (ALMOST) EVERYONE
When I had an iPhone, I blocked calls from anyone not in my contacts list. When someone not in my contacts list called, the phone would not ring and the call would go straight to voicemail. (And scam callers almost never left a voicemail.)
It was rare that I missed a legitimate caller—and when I did, I just checked the voicemail and call them back. The ability to protect my peace and quiet was worth the few instances of legit missed calls.
Other types of phones have this feature, but I wasn’t able to find a clear answer on whether the callers could leave a voicemail or were block-blocked. If you have another brand of phone, it might be worth testing out.
CHAPTER 10: STOP BEING LOYAL
You’re about to buy a mattress online, and a pop-up appears offering you a discount in exchange for your name and email address. You enter the info, and a second pop-up asks you to enter your text number to claim the discount.
Or maybe you’re at the bookstore, and they offer a free tote bag if you sign up for their loyalty program.
I used to work with both the marketing and retail industries, so take it from me: The point of a loyalty program isn’t (only) to reward your loyalty as a customer. It’s also to harvest your data. Many of these companies run a brisk second business selling your information, which marketers slice and dice to learn more about you.
You may be thinking, “There’s no way my friendly local supermarket is harvesting and selling my data.” But as just one example, according to The Markup, “Kroger has carefully grown two ‘alternative profit business’ units that monetize customer information, expected by Kroger to yield more than $1 billion in ‘profits opportunity.’”
One billion dollars...from collecting and selling your data!
If you’re fortunate enough that you can afford to not trade your data for bonuses, discounts, sale notifications, and other perks, consider whether it’s worth joining loyalty schemes. Do you really use Kohl’s cash? Do you need the bonus points from Dick’s Sporting Goods? Is it worth buying into your own exploitation to get a few bucks off your Brookline sheets?
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Delete a loyalty account you don't need or use!
If trading your data for dollars seems like a sweet deal, the good news is that once you’ve put some of the privacy practices from this guide into place, these tactics will help you protect some of your data while still getting the perks. Use a masked email address, enter your secondary phone number, give them your PO box, change your name. (I discovered my grocery store will let me use any name…the address of the store itself as my “home address”...and a random 10-digit number.)
These data points may still wind up attached to your personal profile—for example when you use your credit card at the supermarket, revealing your true identity—but at a bit of disinformation might at least help obscure the real stuff.
PART 3: DISENGAGE BY...RECLAIMING YOUR HOME
Big Tech doesn’t see you only when you’re online. They can find you at home and look right into your house, too. Here, you’ll learn how to hide your home photos, keep your address private, and stop smart home products from sharing your private data.
CHAPTER 11: HIDE YOUR HOME ADDRESS
You may already have gotten your data deleted from people-search sites…but your home address lives in other places online as well. Here are a couple of ways to keep your address mum.
HIDE YOUR HOME ADDRESS BY…GOING PO
When you’re getting food delivered, requesting a taxi, or ordering from an online store, of course these businesses will need to know your home address. But there are many instances where a business doesn’t need this information. For example, your bank, car insurance company, and grocery store don’t need to know where you actually lay your head at night.
One solution is to get a PO box, and to use it anywhere you don’t need to input your actual home address.