RAJA89: Data Privacy and Your Digital Footprint

How to Use This Site

There are two ways in, depending on what brought you here.

If you want the fastest practical improvement, start with hardening your browser and set an auto-delete window on your main account's activity. Those two changes reduce what is collected and shorten how long it is kept, in about half an hour, without breaking anything you rely on.

If you want to understand what is happening and why most privacy advice disappoints, read the four guides in order. Each stands alone, and together they cover the whole path your data takes: how it leaves your device, what your own settings can do about it, what your phone hands over, and what the law lets you demand once it has already gone.

Two support pages sit alongside the guides: the FAQ, which answers the questions readers send most often in a few sentences each, and support and corrections, which explains how to report a factual error and, just as importantly, what we cannot do for you.

Your Digital Footprint, in Two Halves

RAJA89 exists to make one invisible thing visible: the record that ordinary internet use leaves behind. Almost nobody has a clear picture of it, because the record is assembled by companies they never chose, from observations they never saw, and joined together with identifiers designed not to be noticed.

The useful starting distinction is between the two ways data about you comes into existence.

• Active footprint — what you deliberately hand over. A sign-up form, a delivery address, a review, a photo with location data, a support ticket, a comment under your real name. You know these exist, even if you have forgotten most of them.
• Passive footprint — what is observed while you do something else. Page views, click coordinates, how far you scrolled, how long you paused, your IP address, your device model, and the fact that the same browser appeared on three unrelated websites within a minute.

Most advice concentrates on the first category, because it is the part you can see and delete. The observations are the larger part, and they are the part that follows you, because they are the part you never chose and cannot enumerate.

Why this matters in practice

Two consequences are worth holding onto before reading any of the guides.

It is not one database. It is hundreds, held by companies you have never heard of. That is why "delete my data" is never a single action, and why the honest answer to most privacy questions is "less than you would like, but more than nothing".

The join is the real product. Any single observation is mundane. What has commercial value is knowing that the person who read about a medical condition on one site, searched for a symptom on another, and bought a related product on a third is the same person. The identifier is the asset; the observations are the raw material. Almost everything in the tracking guide is about how that join is made.

What Is Actually Collected

Data collection is usually described in the abstract. Concretely, the categories are these.

Two of those deserve a second look. Identifiers are the whole game: if a company cannot tell that two visits are the same person, the profile is worthless. Most privacy controls work by attacking the identifier rather than the observation. And inferred data is the category people most often forget to ask about, even though a wrong inference about your health or finances can do more damage than a correct observation.

Who Ends Up Holding It

Data does not stay where you left it. The organisations that end up with it fall into rough groups, and knowing the groups makes a rights request much easier to aim.

• The service you used. Your account provider, your bank, your employer, the shop. First-hand and directly answerable to you.
• Analytics and advertising companies embedded in the pages you visit, often several per page, each with its own identifier and its own retention policy.
• Software development kits inside the apps you installed — analytics, crash reporting, attribution and advertising libraries bundled by the developer. You chose the app; you did not choose these.
• Data brokers that assemble profiles from public records, loyalty schemes, warranty registrations and purchased datasets, then resell access. The ones publishing a subset openly are the people-search sites.
• Institutions with legal access, where disclosure is compelled. Worth understanding, and not the subject of this site.
• Criminals, once any of the above is breached. This is the route by which data you gave a shop in 2014 becomes a credential-stuffing attempt against your email today.

The practical point is that the company you dealt with is answerable for what it holds and, in most legal frameworks, for what it passed on. The company you never dealt with is the hard case, and it is where the law has been moving.

Threat Modelling: Deciding What You Protect

Privacy advice fails most often because it is applied uniformly. Hiding everything takes enormous effort, breaks useful services, and usually gets abandoned within a fortnight. Deciding what you are protecting against makes the effort proportional.

Four common goals, and the work each actually implies:

If you are in danger rather than simply uncomfortable — stalking, harassment, domestic abuse, or a threat connected to your work — general guidance is not enough. The support page names what we cannot do and where to go instead.

A Realistic Order of Work

If you do nothing else, do these, in this order. Each takes minutes rather than hours, and each has a durable effect.

1. Set an auto-delete window on your main platform account's web, app and location activity. This changes what exists rather than what is displayed, which is why it outranks every advertisement preference.
2. Move tracking protection to its strictest tier and install one reputable content blocker. Learn the per-site exception so a broken login does not make you weaken the global setting.
3. Delete your phone's advertising ID or switch off app tracking requests, and review location permissions by category rather than app.
4. Stop remote images loading in your mail app. That breaks email open tracking outright, and it costs nothing.
5. Keep separate browser profiles for accounts, shopping and ordinary reading, so unrelated activity never shares a cookie jar.
6. Point your devices at an encrypted, filtering DNS resolver, at the router if you can, so televisions and consoles are covered too.
7. Ask the major data brokers to delete your records, and diary a repeat in three months, because profiles get rebuilt.
8. Delete the accounts you no longer use. A dormant account is data you are not watching, in a system you are not checking.

The remaining chapters explain why each of these works, where each one stops, and what the law adds when a setting cannot reach far enough.

RAJA89: quick answers

Back to top ↑