Tek Thing 30 day Security Challenge.

[Harold Mansfield]

One of the regular channels I watch is Tek Thing from Hak5. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6sWaC11f4mxnizvOroOvkQ

Shannon Morse, is running a 30 day challenge to help you beef up your personal security and privacy.
I'm following along and have completed the first 2 days.

Cleaned up all my old devices, phones, and such yesterday. Either factory reset it, snatched out the hard drive, or in the case of a cracked Nexus 7 that could turn on but the touch scree didn't work, I just dumped it in water until it went completely dead.

Now have a pile of e-waste by the door ready to go to recycling and only things that I absolutely use are on my home wifi.

Still hunting down every single account I've ever had and trying to close them out. As you can imagine decades of being online means a crap load of accounts out there that I haven't used in years.

It's a great exercise that I would share for others.
https://snubsie.com/30-day-security-challenge

Hope it's helpful.

[vangogh]

Thanks. I bookmarked the page you linked to and will go through the specifics when I have a chance.

I'm not even sure if I know all the online accounts I've opened. Most of the recent ones are listed in an app I have, but I know there are some old accounts I signed up for and don't remember. I'm not sure I'd go the step of destroying old devices. I would do that before getting rid of them, but for the ones that still work, I'd probably keep them.

Sometimes I wonder if any of it matters. You can do everything right on your end, but the company that collects your information is lax with it and it's stolen anyway or you get a situation like Equifax where we didn't sign up for anything and yet our information is still stolen.

[Harold Mansfield]

I have a tip to find some of your old accounts. I have an app installed called "Truth Finder". https://www.truthfinder.com/
It will bring back the usual public information, but it also lists a lot of accounts that your emails are associated with. For me it listed a bunch of old forum accounts, things I had forgotten about like Klout, Foursquare and Digg and so on.

When I went through my Facebook settings and started removing connected accounts and apps, I was reminded of other old accounts like My Space, apps and games that I no longer use. Each of those were just sitting there with access to my activities, profile info, and friends list.

Also, on Facebook there were a ton of connected advertisers that also had access to all of my info and activities. Facebook is pretty much the head pimp of all your information. Clean it and Google up, as well as your old email accounts (many of which are cross connected) and you'll take care of a lot of tracking.

Also, removing your devices from those accounts. Your devices hold additional info that helps them cross connect email addresses which are on other accounts.