All of you are a favorite target of marketeers. You get marketing calls and spam emails and then wonder how have they got my details? What more do they know about me? You will be surprised to know that you have willingly and legally shared your personal information with them. How? Your social media account and your free mail account! When you use it on default settings you have agreed to share a lot of information about you and you become a categorized and targeted consumer for all.
By making a few simple changes, you can help keep a lot of things on need-to-know basis. I would like to outline 3 of the most frequently mined areas which you can immediately change to protect your personal information.
Here are the steps which would surely help you to reduce the number of this calls and Emails.
1. Social Media Profile
Change contact settings of social media profile like Facebook and LinkedIn to Only Me sometimes you add people and you don’t want them to contact you on email or phone.
How to do it on Facebook?
- From your News Feed click your name in the top left.
- Click About at the top of your profile.
- Click Contact and Basic Info in the left menu.
- Click Edit next to your email and click the audience selector next to your email to change the audience it’s shared with.
- Choose Only me and click on Save Changes to save it.
From <https://www.facebook.com/help/359369650815737?helpref=faq_content>
How to do it on LinkedIn?
- Click the Me icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage.
- Select Settings & Privacy from the dropdown.
- Click the Privacy tab at the top of the page.
- Under the How others see your profile and network information section, click Change next to Who can see your email address.
- Select Only you option from the dropdown menu.
- Note: Your changes will be automatically saved.
From https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/261/visibility-of-your-email-address?lang=en
(If you want to know for any other platform let me know in comment)
2. Google your email ID
- Google your Email ID and see if it’s available in any public domain.
- Sometimes are contact information are available in public directories without your knowledge.
- You can request respective directory to take down your contact information by contacting their support team.
3. Check if your contact detail was available to sale because of any data breach Incident
- Have I been Pawned made it very easy to find if your email ID was a part of any data breach or not. All you have to do is go to https://haveibeenpwned.com/ verify you are not a robot, enter your email ID and click on pwned? Button next to it.
- Once you have found the sites, see if you can login and change your mail ID there and password and other details.
It is up to you to be careful with what you share, and You should take usual precautions when browsing and giving your email id at various real world like shops and establishments
One simple two-edged sword is that due to strict data privacy law across the world, it is mandatory to add Unsubscribe button in mass mailers. You can opt to Unsubscribe from the list. This should work for reputed companies you feel are genuine, but it may also validate your presence for spammers who now can confirm that your mail ID is actually used.
At Matrix3D, we offer world class email solution with advance security features to protect your email box form spam and phishing emails. To know more get in touch with us at connect@matrix3d.com
If you want to know about any other platform, let me know on our Facebook or LinkedIn Page.
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