How to Wipe your Footprints from the Internet
7 Steps for Taking Back Control of your Personal Data
While we enjoy socializing on the internet, expressing our ideas and arguing with strangers, we always leave traces that are only a quick Google search away. When we join any online community, when friends tag us in photos, when we add geotags to any kind of content we publish — we all become traceable and profiled by all kinds of big and small companies that make money on selling this kind of content to advertisers. Today we’ll speak about effectively wiping the traces and even removing your identity from the cyber world completely.
If you feel any kind of anxiety when you think about your personal data that literally anyone in the world can see and analyze, there are at least two ways: to remove some content shared in the past that may be compromising now or to completely wipe all data about you from the internet. Depending on the level of visibility you prefer for yourself online, follow some or all of the tips we have named.
It starts with the basic things like deleting your social media accounts or falsifying the data if you need your contacts and subscriptions and goes further to erasing search results about you. While you can’t delete your physical past, you can minimize the online footprint that may remind about the sometimes embarrassing or just personal moments.
If you hate the idea of always leaving a traceable online activity and prefer to get off the grid — the tips below will guide you through the way of taking back control of your online life.
1. Deactivate or clear primary accounts
The majority of people use the same password or similar passwords for a handful of accounts, deleting inactive accounts is an important security measure. Therefore, it takes a hacker to crack one password to get access, especially when they are all linked via the same email address with no two-step verification. Even if you need your social media accounts for staying connected with acquaintances and using them as a news source — at least delete the profiles you’ve created once but never use. In your mailbox, there must be a pile of letters confirming you have created them — check them out and delete these ghost profiles. If you prefer to stay visible online — check the data that is shown to your friends, to the whole world and the data that is known only to the provider of the service. Delete or hide everything that tells too much about you.
Once you are determined to escape the social media completely, here is the list of quick links to doing it:
If you don’t want to have any trackable data left, delete yourself from online payments systems, game sites and from the websites of your schools, colleges and universities — if you’ve graduated already.
In addition, there are special tools that can help you delete your social accounts:
· Account Killer — a database of sites with direct links to their deletion pages.
· Knowem — finds your accounts on social sites by a username search.
Recently, Swedish developers have created a website that helps users to delete their your online presence with a few clicks. Wille Dahlbo and Linus Unnebäck have designed Deseat.me as a place to “clean up your internet presence”. It lets you see the websites you’re signed up and asks if you want to delete the accounts. Deseat.me scans the services using your email address.
If you are planning to vanish your personal data from the internet, you will also need to deactivate your shopping accounts that commonly include the data stored on Amazon, Macys.com, eBay and others.
Sometimes, it may be harder to delete your data from the free websites where you are the product and get the service for your data. While on eBay and Paypal you aren’t the product and pay the fees, and it’s easy to delete your account and data, it’s not as easy to make social sites to forget about you. In 2013, Twitter signed a deal with the Library of Congress allowing it to archive all public tweets from 2006 on. Therefore, even if you delete your account the data you’ve posted belongs to the government. If you make your Twitter account private, your tweets won’t be archived and they will be available only to approved followers.
2. Falsify undeletable accounts
Falisfy undeletable accounts or create fake accounts with a new name, city, university and interests. Create an alternative biography with non-existent facts and have fun communicating online using your new alter ego. Social media is fun, we all just need some privacy. If you are not planning to go off the grid completely and delete your accounts — you can at least litter the Internet with misleading information about yourself.
With a throwaway email, fake birthday and name you can still get the service without handing your personal data to advertisers, governments and stalkers. If an app or a site asks for your information it doesn’t need to provide the service — don’t share this information. If you have to fill the fields — provide as much alternative facts as you wish.
3. Unsubscribe from mailing lists
Let’s admit that you’ve hardly ever wanted to get these piles of letters, and out of hundreds you get regularly you’ve read a few — accidentally. It’s time to become more selective and stop wasting your inbox on the letters that don’t have any value and interest for you. View the list of your email newsletters, click the link at the bottom of each of them saying unsubscribe and follow the prompts to take your email address off of the mailing list of all kinds of shops and services.
4. Vanity search hard and delete the results
Google personalizes search results and may leave out other pages with your information, so you need to sign out of your account before you perform the search. Then search for your name using different search engines: Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, Yandex. Use different word combinations like your name and the places where you’ve lived, studied, and worked. Whether the data you find is sensitive or not, you can request to remove it.
If you find information like your Social Security number or a bank account number on a certain website, contact the webmaster. Be polite and convincing as some webmasters may argue that this is public information that should remain visible. If they don’t respond or refuse to delete information — send a legal request to Google.
Google also has an URL removal tool to help you create a removal request. To request content removal, contact Bing here, you can also contact Yahoo to remove outdated search results. There’s no guarantee search engines will remove everything they have catalogued, but it’s worth trying to delete everything that is on the surface.
5. Use VPN and secure search engines
Review the profile of your activity on Google and delete the data about you that you wish wasn’t stored. Use your activity controls to limit the types of data that gets saved to your account.
Consider using the search engine services that don’t collect your search data and don’t profile you. DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Ixquick and Blekko are the anonymous search engines that respect your privacy and don’t collect search history. If you prefer mainstream search engines, use VPN to be less exposed.
6. Remove yourself from data broker sites
There firms that make money on collecting and selling publicly shared personal information — data brokers. They include Spokeo, Whitepages.com, and PeopleFinder. Remember, that there are always parties interested to know what you are doing online and then there are people ready to put this data together and provide it. While for your friends you are a personality, for advertisers you are the target audience and they are ready to pay for learning more about you.
Data brokers usually know your name and nicknames, the places where you live and used to live, your phone number, your family members, your birth date, the places where you’ve worked and studied, and more.
While primary data brokers like Intelius collect information from public records, secondary data brokers, including Spokeo, aggregate the data from primary brokers and often add data collected from social media and other open online sources. There are dozens of sites of this kind.
When you request removal from a data collection site, the process can be either easy or complicated, and this is a work that should be repeated regularly as there is no option like asking this sites not to profile you. The data you remove once can pop back up.
If you want your personal information to be removed from data collection sites, you will have to contact them directly and request to opt out. Here is a list of opt-out links to stop data brokers from selling your personal information. To save your information from data brokers, you also need to plug the existing digital leaks and control the permissions you give to the apps and services you use.
7. Use secure email and messengers
Same rules as with free social media apps apply to free messengers — if you don’t pay for the good — you are the good. If the messengers you use are unencrypted or only partly encrypted, your messages, photos and files are potentially vulnerable and accessible to third parties. When you need to send something particularly sensitive — whether it’s personal or business — use encrypted messengers.
The messaging services you have been using since you first went online most probably lack encryption, and if you use the mainstream services — they have access to your data. Deleting your email is an option for the most desperate ones. You may need it to recover the usernames and passwords you have forgotten. However, you can shift your communications to encrypted mailing services that allow users to stay private. Consider using the following options:
· Tutanota
Is wanishing from the web a good idea after all?
Clearing off your digital life means removing the memory about the unwise comments and posts and unflattering photos and hiding the excessive visible content about your life. And while corporations, employers and special services examine the online presence of people, scrutiny sometimes becomes invasive. Hiding private data about yourself from the sites available to anyone in the world is reasonable. But how far really should you go with this? Is online presence beneficial? Won’t it lead the opportunities of getting spotted by a human resource or casting manager and recognized and appreciated for just who you are?
Much of what is suggested above cannot be undone. Deleting the accounts means losing certain connections, access and opportunities, forfeiting marketable presence, and sometimes losing the opportunity to return to the status you’ve been developing throughout the years.
In the professions where media presence increases your value on the market, disappearing from the internet is just inexpedient. However, regardless of your profession, you can use certain methods to be less exposed online than you currently are and control what you show to the world wide web and what you hide from it. Restore your dignity and protect your digital identity, maintaining the wise balance.
Even though there are firms that offer deleting your data from the internet, complete disappearance is barely possible. Many companies eternally keep the data that you’ve once shared with them. Mentions by other people and photos where your face appears may also still stay available online. Deleting or hiding everything that is more or less easy to find is viable and you can always do it once you need it.
VIPole offers end-to-end encrypted messaging and collaboration solutions for teams and enterprises dealing with commercially or personally sensitive information, and individuals wishing to protect themselves from hackers, identity thieves and malware.
More at www.vipole.com
