The Monthly Digital Safety Audit — Six Checks in One Pass

Why monthly, and why all at once

The problem with digital safety advice is that it arrives one alarming article at a time, and nobody rebuilds their entire online life on a Tuesday evening. Batching it solves that. Pick a date — the first of the month, payday, whatever you will actually remember — put twenty minutes in your calendar, and work the same six checks each time.

After the first pass, which takes longer, most months are genuinely quick because you are only looking for what has changed.

The six checks

1. Who can see where you are

Go into your phone's location settings and read the list properly. You are looking for anything set to "Always" that has no business knowing where you are all the time, and any app you no longer use. Set what you can to "While Using".

Then check person-to-person location sharing separately — Find My, Google Maps sharing, Snapchat, WhatsApp live location. These are the ones that matter most, because they were usually switched on deliberately for someone, and often for someone who is no longer in your life.

2. Old accounts and forgotten logins

Look at the list of devices currently signed in to your email, your social accounts and your cloud storage, and sign out anything you do not recognise or no longer own — old phones, a work laptop you handed back, a tablet you sold. Then check which third-party apps have been granted access to those accounts and revoke anything you have not used in a year.

3. What your photos give away

Photos carry the time and place they were taken. Most platforms strip that on upload, but not all do, and files sent directly — email, AirDrop, messaging apps that send "as document" — often keep it. Turn off location tagging in your camera app if you do not need it.

Then look at the backgrounds of anything you post publicly. House numbers, road signs, a school uniform, a delivery label, the view from your window, keys on a table. It is almost never the caption that reveals where you live.

4. Passwords and two-factor

You do not have to overhaul everything. Just make sure the accounts that could be used to reset all the others — your main email above all — have a unique password and two-factor authentication switched on. An authenticator app is better than SMS, because SMS can be intercepted by anyone who gets your number moved to a new SIM.

A password manager makes this trivial. If you are not using one, this is the single highest-value change on the list.

5. Search for yourself

Search your own name, your name with your town, your phone number and your email address. You are checking what someone who only knows your name could find in five minutes — an old address on a company filing, a running club results page, a family member's public post tagging you at home.

Most of what you find can be removed by asking the site that hosts it, and search engines offer removal request forms for personal information such as your address or phone number.

6. Shared accounts and leftovers

Streaming logins, shared cloud albums, joint accounts, a family location group, a shared password vault, delivery accounts with saved addresses. When a relationship or a flatshare ends, these are what quietly persist — and they are the most common way someone keeps visibility over an ex-partner's life without doing anything that looks like hacking.

Change the password, remove the device, leave the group, delete the saved address. If someone is using shared access to monitor or contact you after you have asked them not to, that is not a technical problem — it is stalking, and it is worth reporting.

Do it with someone

Twenty minutes on a video call with a friend, both working the same list, makes this dramatically more likely to happen and much less tedious. It also means someone else knows what normal looks like for your accounts.

One caution: if you believe someone already has access to your devices or accounts, changing settings can alert them. In that situation, use a device they have never had access to, and speak to a specialist organisation before you change anything.