We’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much of our family’s lives exists online without us really choosing it. Not in a paranoid way, but more a gradual realisation that we’d signed up to a lot of pointless things, shared a fair amount of information and never really stopped to consider what happened to any of it. It felt like a good time to have a proper look and make some conscious decisions.
This is what we found, what we changed and what we think is actually worth your time.
Starting with the obvious: what are you signed up to?
The first thing we did was go through our inboxes and take stock. The number of services, newsletters, and platforms that had our email addresses was genuinely surprising. Some of them we hadn’t thought about in years. Many of them almost certainly had more of our data than we remembered giving. Following steps to secure our family’s digital life, we went through and unsubscribed (or deleted accounts entirely where possible), which felt surprisingly satisfying. It also reduced the number of places where our information sits waiting to be part of a data breach.
Rethinking email
Email was the thing we spent the most time on. It is easy to treat it as a utility or something that just exists in the background, but your inbox holds an enormous amount of personal information. Old receipts, medical correspondence, conversations with family, login confirmations for every account you have ever created.
We switched to a privacy-focused email provider and it has genuinely changed how we feel about our inbox. Knowing that our correspondence is not being used to build an advertising profile is a small thing, but it adds up. Some traditional free providers that do not prioritise privacy operate on a model where the product is essentially you, and we decided we were not comfortable with that anymore.
Understanding your rights
One thing we did not know until recently is how much control you actually have over your personal data under UK law. The Information Commissioner’s Office has a really accessible ICO guide to your data rights that explains what organisations can and cannot do with your information, and what you can ask them to do, including deleting it.
We have since made a couple of subject access requests to companies whose data practices we were unsure about. It is a straightforward process and worth knowing exists.
The small stuff adds up
Beyond email, we made a few other changes that took almost no time. Reviewing the privacy settings on our social media accounts. Switching to a browser that does not track activity by default. Being more deliberate about which apps we grant location access to.
None of these feel like sacrifices. They just feel like decisions we should have made earlier.
The goal was never to disappear from the internet. It was to feel like we had made active choices rather than just drifted into whatever the default settings happened to be. That shift in mindset has been the most useful thing to come out of all of this.