A beginner-friendly online privacy guide for 2026

Your personal information is actively being harvested and sold to the highest bidder, feeding a global data broker industry worth a staggering $400 billion.

Getting worse by the year, the beginning of 2026 alone saw almost 500 major data breaches. Weaponizing this leaked data, personalized, AI-driven scams have increased the rate of victims falling for them by almost 60% this year.

If you fell for a scam: It is not a shame.

But it's time to take your privacy back!

Improving your privacy right away with our easy to follow 3-step guide

There is no need to become a cybersecurity expert or to learn programming to fight back, but you do need a plan and a general understanding of how the web works.

Here's a 3-Phase guide that starts with simple but effective action items and leads to convenient full-home privacy and security:

1. Checkup: Find out if your personal data was leaked and take immediate action

The easiest and most reliable way to check whether your email, phone number, passwords, or even medical records have been publicly exposed in a breach is to use a secure, encrypted checker like HaveIBeenPwned.

Verify with a secure, encrypted data breach archive, which of your personal data already has been leaked.

Check if my data was leaked

Read our emergency action plan if your data was leaked

If you just discovered that your data was leaked or hacked, read up on our easy-to-follow article about data leaks and what to do if you find yourself to be a victim:

2. Prevention: Prevent data leakage, and protect yourself or your entire home network and family

Not only online advertisers or internet browsers, but institutions you'd trust - like your internet service provider, email provider, or online storage provider - without shame, scan your data:

You need to be extra vigilant.

Five things to improve your privacy and security right now

The most important suggestions probably do not come as a surprise - you might have heard them a lot, but did you follow them yet?

Use an Ad Blocker to stop constantly leaking data on the web and make it more secure.
Use a privacy-first browser that also runs much faster without the spy-bloat.
Replace your passwords with secure passwords you can not forget by using a password manager.
Use a secure, encrypted storage provider that complies with strict Swiss privacy laws and does not train AI with your private data.
Use a secure email provider that respects your privacy and does not scan your mails.

What else you can do to improve privacy and security for you or your household

Of course, that's not all you can do - that's just the low hanging fruits.

There is more, depending on your area of friction or distrust, and I recommend at least getting familiar with these topics, so you are aware during daily internet usage:

3. Cleanup: Remove your leaked information even after it spread

Even after you switched your commonly used services to secure and truly private services, your formerly leaked data can re-surface or pieces of current data leak.

Unfortunately, there is no single button you can press to make all your leaked information disappear. However, strong privacy laws like the European GDPR and similar ones in other regions world wide hand you legal tools to demand deletion of your data.

I wrote a guide with a little more insight into how that data broker market works and why manual removal isn't the best idea, but basically you have two options (besides doing nothing, of course):

Manually requesting removal of your data from the biggest brokers

It is entirely possible to manually request deletion of your data.

You'd need to choose which data brokers you want to target, and go through separate specific processes each - which are similar in the data they need, but differ in details and processing times:

Automatically removing your data from hundreds of brokers

Instead of having manual data deletion eating half of your spare time, being quite frustrating and still not complete, you can use removal services taking on all the hard work for you.

Dedicated removal services send legally binding deletion demands to hundreds of brokers simultaneously, and automatically challenge them when your data inevitably pops back up: