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Marta Ronquillo Newhart, who sits on multiple public company boards, had already done the things a security program asks of a leader. She’d hardened the network, signed off on the budgets, and ran the tabletop exercises. The crisis plan was written and waiting.
Then she looked herself up.
“There was information out there that I didn’t even know existed,” she says. Addresses where she’d lived years earlier. Her age. The names of her relatives. All of it sitting behind a button that said push here for full report, $20.
Newhart is direct about why this took her longer to see than it should have. Nobody warns you, she says, when you step into an executive role: your data is already out there, in more places than you’d guess. Proxy statements. Conference speaker lists. Company websites. And once it’s scattered across enough public sources, a data broker can stitch your personal records to your professional ones without much effort.
For a long time Newhart treated the whole thing as an errand, the kind that slides down the list every week. What shifted her thinking was noticing the shape of the problem.
The difference since she signed up for VanishID shows up two ways. One she can count: fewer spam calls, fewer spam texts, fewer phishing attempts reaching her. The other is harder to put a number on. Her professional presence is still visible, because it should be. The personal layer underneath it isn’t.
Her advice to other executives runs short. “Don’t take as long as I did.”
