Looking up your name online can set off alarm bells. You may find old photos of yourself, information from inactive social media accounts, comments under blog posts of course, the internet doesn’t forget. Once something is posted online, control over that information is completely lost.
As personal and professional circumstances change, out-of-control information on the web can become a double-edged sword. No one knows this better than political candidates, who often go through a heavy review and cleanup of their digital content when they run.
It is becoming more and more common for people to want to completely disappear from the digital world. They wish they could type their name and find that absolutely nothing appears. This could be due to a sudden awareness of privacy or work issues. But is it really a good thing that there is no trace of someone on the internet?
Today not having a fingerprint is counterproductive and generates a certain distrust, explains Daniel Lpez, CEO and co-founder of Youforget.me, a platform dedicated to managing the privacy of internet users. This expert advises managing our digital selves so that the information available online is consistent with a person’s profile and inspires trust.
Is it possible to completely disappear from the Internet? I would say no, explains Alejandro Abascal, founder of Remove Group, a company dedicated precisely to deleting personal information from the web. There are many environments on the internet that are impossible to control, such as the dark web, he adds. However, you can remove the vast majority of traffic related to yourself. This expert says that, for example, new legislation at the European level is evolving to respond to privacy needs, such as the right to be forgotten, the right to dignity on the Internet or data protection law. New EU legislation protects a citizen unless [they] is a person known to be in the public interest, in which case it conflicts with freedom of information.
There is a fine line between the right to privacy and the right to information which is subject to interpretation. It generates an important controversy, generating one of the great debates, says the expert, referring to the ongoing discussions about privacy in the Internet age.
Delete inactive accounts
To eliminate all traces of yourself online, you should start with the simplest action: deleting inactive accounts for services you don’t use. Unfortunately, unless you have a detailed record of everything, the only way to bring up these pages is to do your Google search for identifying traces of your fingerprint. The bad news is that it’s not always easy to remove personal information. In fact, there are some sites that make it nearly impossible to remove your information.
The JustDelete.me web page offers instructions for deleting information for major websites, along with traffic light colors, which indicate the level of difficulty. Going through them, you can see that some have the label impossible, due to the amount of difficulties presented by the respective service provider.
Deletion of social media profiles
Social media has become a huge repository of personal information, where with a little time and patience it is possible to profile a person and their activity simply by examining their posts. Anyone who wants to erase their online presence and control their personal information should consider deleting their accounts entirely. You may remember when Facebook was in the eye of the storm and became the target of a campaign urging its users to cancel their accounts, due to a massive data leak at the hands of Cambridge Analytica. Personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected without their consent by the British consultancy firm.
The problem is not simply that what is posted on social media offers meaningful personal information about a user. The biggest problem is that even this information is never deleted. Our memory will continue to be present once we are dead, warns Daniel Lpez, and it is essential to manage social media accounts, eliminating those that are in disuse or that do not represent us.
Request removal of information
Rules of immediate satisfaction on the Internet: you sign up for a service and enjoy it instantly. But does the same thing apply when you want to unsubscribe? It depends on the service although generally the answer is no. Logging out of an online service can be torturous, if not impossible. But there is no choice but to go through the process. The first thing anyone who wants to completely disappear from the Internet (or, at least, be irrelevant to search engines) should do is run a Google search and identify the sites where they appear.
In these cases, it’s best to use a hyperlink archiving service like Pocket or Instapaper to archive the different websites where your name appears. For what purpose? Request, one by one, the deletion of data. Service providers have a period of 30 days to resolve a data deletion request, stresses Alejandro Abascal. If it is a large platform, the response period is 15 days longer.
In case of no response from the services that host our personal information, the next step is the request [its] removal by search engines themselves, recommends Abascal. In theory, when the water tap is turned off, the flood ends but not really.
Search engines are only obligated to strip your name, warns Absacal. Photos, videos and other mementos will remain visible online and on the servers of companies that refuse to cancel your account.
Sabotage those who refuse
Since online services don’t always respond to data deletion requests, the saying applies here if you can’t beat them, join them. The next goal will be to confuse Internet searchers, in a tactic known as infosuicide. A desperate user can fill the web with empty references to himself.
What is this all about? Well, you can create pages (full of neutral content) that bear your name. Or, alternatively, you can change your name and make it unintelligible to rogue services that deny people the right to disappear from the online world.
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