this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2026
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No idea what level of defense is actually necessary; not having a phone, or any bills or official correspondence sent in your name to your home will suffice, but I don't know what it takes which is less than that
First of all getting rid of the phone and internet will not remove what is already there. If I died right now all the data is still going to be there and not erased on account of me being dead.
I have been easing into reducing my online signature as much as possible over the past few years. It is far from perfect, I know. That is also the stuff going forward and does not handle what is already past.
Like I still watch videos on YouTube mostly, and I still have a compromised Gmail account (compromised in that no matter what I do someone or someones have been using it to sign up for shit that clearly isn't mine). And while I no longer use my real for social media, and my last known usage of Facebook was from last summer (and I greatly diminished what I was doing over a few years at that point). None of this removes what data brokers already have.
Yeah, it takes something like the California data brokers opt out to do that.
Or actively poisoning their data sets at scale