Your family most likely has hundreds of accounts on various websites, with your emails, documents, and notes scattered all over the internet. Keeping track of your own accounts can be a challenge, much less trying to do so for your whole family in a logical and coherent way. Every account you have just increases the odds that a breach may lead to a cyber criminal taking over all of your accounts, especially if you've not been using a unique secure password for every site. Security concerns aside, lack of organization in any area of life can often lead to stress, which over time can cause a variety of health issues.

Just like you organize your home on occasion in order to have a restful place to exist in the physical world, you should also organize your cyber space so that you can have the same measure of peace when working with technology.

First, we recommend that every family have a shared account manager or password manager, that stores the URL and login information for all of your online accounts in a way that is easy to browse, search, and share amongst the family. You'll never loose track of an account and never have to worry about remembering passwords. Some password managers can even alert you if any of your password were involved in a breach, so you know when to change your passwords in order to stay safe. Enumerating your accounts will take some time up front, but you'll find it worth it in the long run, as you will be able to unload a lot of information from your memory.

Second, once you have a way of tracking the accounts you have, you should regularly delete any accounts that you no longer use. The process for deleting accounts varies for each website, but you can always contact support for that website if you can't figure it out. This will offset the new accounts you create and keep your total number of accounts to a reasonable number. This will both help you, by reducing the amount of data about you on random servers, and help the company, as they will no longer have to maintain your user record and data.

Third, we recommend that every family switch to self-hosting their core services using a platform such as OYCS Iolite, our software platform that is designed to make self-hosting simple for anyone. This will mean that the services you use most, such as your photos, files, emails, and notes, are well defined and fully within your control. This will provide a general peace of mind, as you can be certain that your data is safe and that you will always be able to access it. The remaining accounts will be only for services that are necessarily external, such as social media, banking, insurance, and the like.