WhaleSlide’s Data Detox — Day 5

So this is it guys — the final day of our week-long Data Detox! Congratulations on making it this far. Like any detox, it won’t work in the long term if you just go back to how things were before. Remember that nasty digital bloat weighing you down? How attention-seeking your smartphone was and how greedily your apps were collecting your data? We suggest setting some simple and realistic goals to help you move through 2018 with your digital privacy intact.

Consider ‘detoxing’ more of your accounts over time — perhaps one or two a week over the next month. We discussed on day 2 how to clean up your Google and Facebook accounts, but what about your iCloud, Skype, Twitter, LinkedIn and Dropbox accounts?

Here’s an easy step-by-step guide to help you detox them one at a time:

1. Amend your privacy settings to control who can see what, who can get in touch with you and how (i.e. phone or e-mail) and limit the settings in relation to adverts where possible.
2. It’s probably a good idea to come up with a new password. Make it strong and unique. We were shocked to discover one of our password’s was included in a list at the Glass Room’s exhibition following a hack on LinkedIn in 2012, thankfully we had changed it since!
3. Remove any photos, posts and comments you don’t want people to see and un-tag anything you’re not comfortable with.

There were eight volumes containing 4.7m LinkedIn user passwords printed in alphabetical order at the Glass Room.

To prevent the need for a giant data detox in future, there are a few small regular steps you can take which will help you to ‘clean as you go’.

We suggest keeping things clean by clearing your cookies and browser history, logging out of your accounts, and deleting/un-tagging new photos and posts once a month. Check and limit app permissions as you download them (don’t just blanket agree to everything) and delete any app you haven’t used after say 3 months — if you’ve not logged into it for 90 days, chances are you won’t miss it when it’s gone. Finally, share this info with your friends and family. Let them know that every time they upload data concerning you or tag you in something that you’ll only un-tag yourself in anyway, they’re adding to you data build up and making your choices harder. If your mum still doesn’t get it, remind her how annoyed she was when Karen next door brought chocolate fudge cake to a “bring a dish” event when she knew everyone had just joined Slimming World.

So that’s it. It’s simple really. All you need to do going forwards is perform regular, brief, refreshes of the things we’ve discussed over the past 5 days, as little or as often as you like, and spread the word! The more people we can get on board the better, and congratulations on becoming the shiny, new digital you.

We hope you’ve enjoyed out week-long series of Data Detox and be sure to let us know how you found it by tweeting and sharing with the hashtag #WhaleslideDataDetox. Feel free to get in touch with any questions or queries via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram. Happy new year from the WhaleSlide team!