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Ask HN: What Are the Best Current Methods to Delete Yourself from the Internet?

For those of us interested in dropping off the grid, what are the best current methods of removal of information from search engines and servers that host information about you, whether known by you or not? How could these methods be improved upon to increase the coverage of erasure? And what do you think the future of personal identify cleanup will look like, or will it even be possible after a certain point?

ZitchDog 10y ago
I don't think there's any way. There are too many identity aggregators. I think the only way would be to create lots of fake profiles and fake information tied to your name, thereby drowning out the signal.
eterm 10y ago
Don't try to change the internet, just change everything else. Move country, change your name, change the industry in which you work and change the hobbies in which you are interested. Change the clothes you wear and your style of haircut. All of that is a lot easier than trying to track down all lose-ends over the internet. You won't escape state-level actors if that is your concern but you'll have some distance between your offline and online history.
- yarou 10y ago
  I don't think he's suggesting to revise the protocols of the Internet. He's merely asking for a method to delete his online footprints, in which case there are many services to accomplish this task.
  - AznHisoka 10y ago
    .. and that is precisely what the parent is recommending. Changing your personal information is the antithesis of revising the protocols of the internet.
  - ryanlol 10y ago
    > He's merely asking for a method to delete his online footprints, in which case there are many services to accomplish this task There are not. Unless you're willing to spend millions, of course.
    - nstj 10y ago
      Link? Quote? Article describing services which cost millions to deindex a person?
      - invalidOrTaken 10y ago
        That's the point. Sometimes "not for sale" means incredibly cheap, like air. Sometimes it means "not available in standardized fashion," like trips to the moon.
        nstj 10y ago
        For sure, completely understood, but it's hard to say that something exists without giving some kind of evidence that it actually does.
      - ryanlol 10y ago
        Yeah, it's called hiring a law firm.
        nstj 10y ago
        Partner at a global law firm charges ~$1k/hr, this would take 500 hrs of their time and 1000 hrs of an associates? Seems a bit vague?
        ryanlol 10y ago
        >Partner at a global law firm charges ~$1k/hr, this would take 500 hrs of their time and 1000 hrs of an associates? Doesn't seem all that unrealistic considering you probably won't have much legal ground to stand on. >Seems a bit vague? Yeah, that's the whole point...
  - disordinary 10y ago
    Can you point out some of these services? It seems that they are exactly what the poster is looking for.
- Fraterkes 10y ago
  Its an interesting take on the problem, but it seems a bit exagerated that taking on a completely new identity in a different country is a lot easier than hunting down and deleting some old accounts.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  Seriously, this is the best advice. It has been used for literally hundreds of years as people changed their name and moved to a new town to escape a reputation or community memory where they lived. But if you want to be more deliberate about it, then the question you have to ask are "Who would be looking for you on the Internet and not like what they found?" That runs the gamut from old classmates to people you're dating to current or future employers to federal agents. Stay off Facebook and legally change your name, that will protect you from old classmates. If you're running away from bad reviews on dating sites you may need to change your name, move, and change your haircut and appearance. If you are worried about employers you'll probably need to change your social security or taxpayer ID. That gets into the realm of felony territory so you're going to want to be thoughtful about that. Without it though the IRS can connect all the dots and there are various ways background checks can do the same thing. The alternative might be to try fuzzing, basically create a bunch of accounts with your name and be different people on each of them. That has the down side of obviousness in terms of obfuscation.
  - bsder 10y ago
    > If you're running away from bad reviews on dating sites God, the fact that this is a thing makes me shake my head ...
    - nsgi 10y ago
      Is it? I thought most people used pseudonyms anyway.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- jasonkostempski 10y ago
  You won't even have to go further than this site to run into obstacles, you can't delete your HN account, I've tried. And, like me, OP seems to have used their real name.
  - closeparen 10y ago
    What do you think deleting your HN account would accomplish? All your comments will still be there, and likely backed up by Google Cache, the Internet Archive, HN Search, and anyone else using the HN API. "Delete my account" may be feel-good symbolism but AFAICT it rarely if ever makes a real difference to the subject (other than emotionally).
  - 464192002d7fe1c 10y ago
    Technically I also used my real name as my account name... just the md5 of my name :)
  - gaius 10y ago
    Yeah, this is an issue for those of us who came online in a different era of the Internet. Nowadays people can and should assume that the Internet is actively hostile and malicious before they even log in for the very first time. We grew up in a far more innocent age. Loads of us used our real names on Usenet for example because it simply never occurred to us that someone was archiving it all, after all, why would anyone even want to do such a thing? And who had the money for it? And they didn't tell anyone they were doing it until years after they started, which was in very poor taste.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      Even way back when, archives of Usenet postings were a thing. (Although it wasn't really systematically or completely archived.) Perhaps many people didn't fully appreciate how things they wrote under their True Names could be out there "forever." Or they assumed that Usenet was pretty much an exclusive club and things they wrote wouldn't be visible to the general public. But I'm not sure why someone posting on Usenet would assume that whatever they wrote was ephemeral and wouldn't be seen by anyone else a few years hence.
- aq3cn 10y ago
  MS, Apple and Google has biometric information about you, how will you avoid that? That's the reason I am against fingerprint scanner in iPhone or Macbook as they associate it with Apple ID for transaction. I don't know if facial recognition by MS in Surface associates that information with email id. Joke: Nuke fb, ggle, crapple etc.
maccard 10y ago
For those of us who aren't looking to totally drop off the grid, but are concerned about their online footprint and privacy online; check out https://www.privacytools.io https://www.privacytools.io (not affiliated). It's a good starting point for choosing trusted third party services. I'd be interested in other responses or advice for people who try and do the same.
- thatwebdude 10y ago
  Nice resource, I like the endorsement by GG. Will definitely be checking it out...
anondon 10y ago
The problem is that the user has no control over his data, so you are at the mercy of the service provider. Surprisingly, a lot of websites/services don't even give you the option to delete your account. Best method to delete yourself from the internet: * make a list of all services you are on * if a service lets you delete your account, delete it * if there is no delete option, email customer support and ask them to delete your account. Most sites will not create a fuss about it though it takes time and lots of back and forth with the customer support * search for yourself on google and ask google to remove links to your profiles(social media). They won't remove links to eg- articles about you, since it does not belong to you Depending on how generous you were with your personal info, it is most likely not possible to delete yourself completely. Funny story: I had a LinkedIn account where I signed up with only my email ID and gave no personally identifiable info(like a fake account). A few days later I get an SMS from LinkedIn telling me person XYZ sent me a request or something. How the f_uck did you get my number? To say the least, that scared me so I deleted the account. Also note that when a service deletes your account and data, it is more often a soft delete so your data is still with them. Good luck getting a hard deletion of your account/data.
- rawnlq 10y ago
  For example you can't even delete your comments/account on hacker news
  - tokenizerrr 10y ago
    Luckily not. I've seen what happens on Reddit when people do that, and it's awful. Come back to an old thread and it's full of [deleted] and "This comment has been deleted by a script blablabla by the way fuck you"
    - CM30 10y ago
      This is also why most online community/forum owners don't let users delete their own posts (or in a lot of cases, delete their account). Because it makes the content real hard to read/make sense of if some of it randomly goes missing for whatever reason.
antidaily 10y ago
Sounds like a great SaaS product. Get to work, guys.
- Lordarminius 10y ago
  > Sounds like a great SaaS product... maybe not so much because any measure you come up with will be met by countermeasures from the data aggregators and your business model is reliant on the companies complying with your data deletion request
- greglindahl 10y ago
  There are already several SaaS products in this space. They do things like: (1) giving you instructions for deleting yourself on sites that allow it, (2) flood the Internet with fake content about your name, (3) file (potentially bogus) DMCA notices/RTBF requests for stuff that wasn't buried by (1) and (2). It's called "reputation management" by some. As an example of (3), sites like Ripoff Report won't remove info, but, if you can get a copyright logo or photo onto a Ripoff Report page, you can DMCA google & have the entire page unindexed.
tyingq 10y ago
If the purpose is to make it hard for a 3rd party to use internet searches to find out information about you, there's an easier way. Instead of the impossible task of making web pages with your name go away, instead, flood the internet with fake information tied to your name and identity. Create profiles with your real name, but everything else faked on popular sites. They'll have a better chance of crowding out pages you want to push down in search results if you make them actually valuable, versus just junk profiles. For example, a fake github identity, but with some actual useful project hosted there carries more weight. Or a profile (your name, faked job, faked photo) on LinkedIn that's tied to actual, insightful posts. Not easy to do in a way that's there's enough volume to crowd out whatever you're trying to hide. But, it's certainly easier than trying to convince third parties to take down existing web pages.
- whatshisface 10y ago
  The interested party could just look at the timestamps and ignore everything posted after the date when contradictory information began to appear.
  - tyingq 10y ago
    There are some platforms that allow for backdating posts and/or dates. I'm pretty sure github is in that category, as is wordpress.com, etc. You might also have some existing accounts that you could edit/repurpose.
  - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
    That wouldn't work if you also moved and changed phone numbers -- the correct information would be new, along with the fake.
    - whatshisface 10y ago
      If you moved and changed addresses without publishing your new location, (and if this was all you were trying to obscure), you would have no need to begin an elaborate chaffing campaign - the internet would already not know your address!
iamthepieman 10y ago
You have to consider who you are trying to hide from. Hiding something in the face of an active pursuer is an act of aggression or at least, counter-aggression. In warfare there is the concept of enemy combatant. An ethical force will adhere to the idea that they only actively pursue and disable combatants not merely resistors, demonstrators or those taking countermeasures to protect themselves. Some people may be combatants by things other than actions of violence. Wearing an enemy uniform even if you are not holding a rifle or actively participating in a battle, spying, providing serious material aid to the combatants etc. I think these are apt comparisons to privacy and personal information because having them is a sort of ephemeral habeas corpus (I'm aware of the contradiction). You 'have the person' (that's what habeas corpus literally means) in a digital/information sense. Of course there's no exclusivity as there is with an actual bodily person. Warfare is ultimately about controlling the bodies - you kill the bodies and then you win. If more of your bodies are standing or if more of their bodies can be convinced to stop fighting or to come over to your side or just lose the will to fight then you win (trying to encompass more than just battlefield warfare here which is quickly becoming less important) So this very long winded setup is just to say that the "future of personal identity cleanup" is an oxymoron or at least a contradiction. "Hiding" whether digitally or otherwise is an ACTIVE thing. I guess the cleaning concept is useful to a degree. If I clean my kitchen then it stays clean...until I make dinner the next night - which, because I need to eat, I will inevitably do. And then it's just as messy and requires just as much effort as it did previously to clean. So unless you are dead, you can't just clean up your digital trail and be done. This is assuming that you want to go about living a relatively normal life and not smuggle yourself to an uninhabited island. So the future of digital privacy will be a series of compromises and trade offs. I don't want to be at all disrespectful about the situation in Syria because it is grief ridden disaster but I think this illustration is a good one. There are still people in Syria. You may think to yourself, "Why are people still in Syria? People with families". Because some people can't leave, some people don't think it's that bad for any number of reasons such as blind luck, blind faith or any other form of blindness. Regardless they are still there. And that's how digital privacy is. Most people won't care which means there won't be a demand which means you will stand out when you do demand (to be not seen) This is too long. TLDR: 1: TOOLS - tools to help you just like new kitchen gadgets. Some will be fads, some will be workhorses like the classic kitchenaid mixer and others will be just for pros or people with a passion for it. 2. KNOWLEDGE - Knowing how to hide what you really want to hide. This is going to be helped more and more by tech. People who don't want to hide anything won't ever know about these but those who do will. Starts with VPNS, separate accounts, never bringing a device with an EMF signal to certain places, how to use strong encryption etc. but includes basic digital tradecraft. 3: COMPROMISE - Don't ever use social media. Or do and realize that part of your life is never going to get a privacy cleanup. It's the fryolator of your digital life. Makes things delicious, unhealthy and never clean. Other compromises and realizing that just like credit, it's hard to repair mistakes in digital privacy. The question is so simple. . . . I wish the answer was. Sorry this is so rambling. I was going to include a why you should listen to me section but then I'd have to tell you who I am.
idlewords 10y ago
The answer depends a lot on location... where do you live, and what's your full name?
- Duckpaddle2 10y ago
  Ha Ha :>O
- Someone 10y ago
  The profile page for user christianbryant links to a page on darkreading.com that claims the name for that user is Christian Bryant, so, if the name isn't Christian Bryant, he (or maybe 'she'?) shows another way to 'delete' information about oneself from the internet: bury it in misinformation. That's a lot of work and won't erase everything, but it can help.
  - softawre 10y ago
    Swoosh
petilon 10y ago
In the United States, if you register to vote your name, age, address, and the names of people who live at the same address all end up on https://voterrecords.com https://voterrecords.com and they don't let you remove it. If you are 40+ this may subject you to age discrimination--you may not even make it to the interview stage. I am now looking into how I can unregister to vote. If you fill in an application to rent an apartment, or purchase property, your information ends up on the internet. Our laws need to be updated for the internet age. There is public interest in knowing who owns the property at a certain address, but the reverse lookup of the same information--where does a certain citizen live--should be made illegal without the permission of the citizen.
- adventurer 10y ago
  The site has a link at the bottom of user pages to opt-out. They keep you listed but remove your address and telephone number.
  - petilon 10y ago
    The opt-out is for information they added on top of what is in your voter record. They don't let you opt out of information that's in your voter record.
    - nommm-nommm 10y ago
      Because your voting record is public information.
      - krishanath 10y ago
        Sure, but we need new laws on how public information can be used. Just because you want to register to vote shouldn't mean your date of birth can now be made freely available to identity thieves and potential employers who can use the info to discriminate against you.
        10y ago
iamthepieman 10y ago
Off the grid is a good phrase. Have you ever tried living off the electrical grid? You either spend a ton of money building your own "grid" so your life doesn't have to change or your life becomes radically different from everyone else you used to know including yourself.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
known 10y ago
Repairing Online Reputation? https://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/02/17/1824232/repairing--establishing-online-reputation https://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/02/17/1824232/repairing--e...
koksik202 10y ago
I had sent emails to websites I held accounts for but I forgot logins to e.g. myspace to delete my content and they did :) I was not happy with pictures I posted years ago just before my interview after finishing college. I have active social network accounts I m not paranoid about the information there
dbg31415 10y ago
I have a fairly unique name. Anyway 5 years ago I was on a date, met the girl online. She started asking me about places I had lived... and she just knew way too much about me. She confessed she had paid like $20 to look me up on one of those extended search services before the date. There was no second date. Totally creeped me out... but I did get the name of the service she used, and when I got home I ran a search on myself to see what all was there. What's worse than all the information being out there, or parallel I guess, is that the shitty service had a bunch of information wrong. It said I lived in a state where I co-signed a lease for my sister (and since I have the same last name as my sister the service drew the conclusion we were married), it said that I still owned a home in yet another state (I had sold it years before)... It also returned my year-by-year income (most of which was fairly accurate), court records (even from when I was a little kid showing up at my parents' divorce hearing), and the exact amount I still owed on my house. No clue how they got all that shit. Around that time I went looking for ways to purge it all, I stumbled across this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/j1mit/how_to_remove_yourself_from_all_background_check/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/j1mit/how_to_re... I filled out every opt-out form I could find. Here we are, 5 years later... I can say... a few less scammy sites show up when you search for me... but on the whole not really much impact. A bunch of information these sites have is still wrong, and a lot of the sites... even if you go through all the trouble of opting out... they only honor the opt-out for a year. I asked my lawyer if there was a way, how do celebrities and such keep their records out of these people's hands... and his response was, "You probably have to contact each site and pay then to take you off..." At which point I decided to cheer if anyone ever fire-bombed the offices of Radaris or Spokeo or Yatedo or any of the other shit-information sites. We need laws that make it legal for us to all kick the CEO of these companies in the nuts -- one good solid kick each. Freedom of information, all that... necessary for democracy... and it's just a short hop from there over to aggregation services... but we should at least ensure that people who want to profit off eroding privacy shouldn't be able to reproduce. Seems like there was an update to that post. https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/31u84n/how_to_remove_yourself_from_most_background_check/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/31u84n/how_to_r...
- contingencies 10y ago
k-mcgrady 10y ago
Recently I decided to try to 'remove myself from the internet'. I just wanted to be a bit more private personally. The best way I could come up with was to Google myself, go through the first 2-3 pages and work on removing that data. So I had to get some stuff removed from Crunchbase (had to email them for this), delete my Twitter, tell Facebook not to let search engines index me (same for LinkedIn). I also changed from using my real name to using a handle on some services (e.g. GitHub). It too some time but recently I had a new friend tell me they were trying to find me online and couldn't so it was quite a successful approach.
- dorianm 10y ago
  Nice! Yes that's quite a good method. I also found that googling my name + some relevant keywords (like ruby, programming, resume, etc. in my case) found relevant results
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    Fortunately my name is fairly common, and a google search for it alone shows no links related to me, well past page 10 or so of results, so horay for good opsec. Use the right keywords though and you can still find me. A good newbie approach is to start by not using any of the popular social media stuff (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) and if you do, make sure it has no information about you or fake information. EDIT: Of course I acknowledge a determined attacker could obtain all sorts of info about me. Not bragging or inviting doxxing, kthx.
slvrspoon 10y ago
we've run this service for a number of years and processed probably a million or so opt-outs successfully. nothing "deletes you from the web" obviously, but happy to answer any questions from anyone: https://www.abine.com/deleteme/landing.php https://www.abine.com/deleteme/landing.php
the-dude 10y ago
You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave ...
- thatwebdude 10y ago
  "You can deactivate any time you like, but you can never delete!..." (Guitar solo...)
manumit 10y ago
The only way to win is to never have played. At this point, forget about data privacy. If the data is out there, it's out there and you're never going to change that. The best you can hope for is for the actual practical consequences to be mitigated by effective legal constraints on what people can do to you based on your data. In the US, there are a few examples of this kind of protection - the Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act prohibits genetic information being used to deny/price health insurance coverage, or to discriminate in employment. The Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) prohibits denial of health insurance coverage for (or due to) pre-existing conditions. (Note that life insurance in the US is not covered by these laws, so people who may ever need life insurance coverage would be ill-served by ANY kind of genetic testing for any reason - the information can only hurt you. And god help you if you have a bad credit rating; in most places you won't be able to get a decent job or housing.) Many European countries have better protections against discrimination in housing, employment, and insurance coverage on the basis of personal data (in addition to granting individual rights over that data held by third parties.) As an American who suffered identity theft in the US and suffered all kinds of hassles for years as a result, the single thing that ameliorated them best was leaving the USA and moving to an EU member state.
Tempest1981 10y ago
In 4th grade, they started teaching kids about their "digital tattoo". A reasonable analogy -- like a tattoo, it's very hard to erase whatever you put out there. Non-profit: http://www.mydigitaltat2.org http://www.mydigitaltat2.org
- thatwebdude 10y ago
  Props 4 da super cool naming.
phkahler 10y ago
Distributed social media where all your posts are on your own private server/NAS box next to your router. This means only people you "connect with" will have access. No companies will collect data. At the time of your choosing you can just delete your info. This doesn't prevent your friends from making copies, but they usually won't. As for sites like HN, use an alias so the posts can't be connected back to the real you. That's hard to put leakage, so let's try to create such sites so that when an account is deleted it really is. Not sure how to ensure that.
- an_account 10y ago
  While this seems like a good way to limit online exposure, OP seems to be asking how delete online exposure after being a more typical internet user.
- rhizome 10y ago
  You just described a major feature of the imaginary federated social network I've been designing in my head for the past several years: you have a "profile information provider" (your phone, a third-party website) that you subscribe into your various social networks, SNs then existing only to provide a social graph within their context. Your personal info then remains under your control (as the idea goes) with access granted and revoked at will.
id122015 10y ago
First, delete all the content you published and social network accounts like I did. Change the name first of those accounts to be sure that if they wont totally delete your account, it will not be your name in the system. In the case of some websites you may be able to convince the owners to delete the content you posted. Some other websites, might not be easily convinced, but you can bait them with money to achieve your goal. I did all that. Currently the only place my full name shows on the internet in on Companies House, because they keep those records, for almost 20 years after you close a company. And those same records get published by third parties also. Other than that, I'm GHOSTING.
- thatwebdude 10y ago
  Are we sure social networks aren't versioning almost every piece of metadata about you? After all, storage is cheap.
givinguflac 10y ago
If I want to remove something, I edit as much of it as possible to be underscores and/or fake/nonsense, then delete the comment/account. So unless the service keeps various versions of the same comment (some may, many don't) that info is effectively gone.
darkhorn 10y ago
http://backgroundchecks.org/justdeleteme/ http://backgroundchecks.org/justdeleteme/
Tempest1981 10y ago
If you do change your name/identity/city, do you also switch careers? How do you approach applying for jobs? Do you make a fake resume/CV? Or just a new empty one focused more on "skills" vs job history? And what do you say when they ask about job experience? Honesty, I guess, but it might make them curious/suspicious/nosey.
cm2187 10y ago
Give all service providers a unique email, and a fake name. It will be very hard to correlate your identity between two providers. And most providers don't need your real name.
z3t4 10y ago
change your name, email adress and phone nr.
invaliduser 10y ago
"John Smith" I personally found that having a very very common name provides a lot of privacy. If you look me up by my real firstname/lastname, you'll find out we are borg, we are 1000s, and I'm burried somewhere far and deep in the search results.
- ghaff 10y ago
  For better or worse, having a very common name is one of the best ways to hide. By contrast, my name is effectively unique (at least among people who have any web presence). The worst of both world though is probably having an almost unique name that you share with someone notorious who could plausibly be you for reasons of age, location, etc. I once knew someone who shared names (in the pre-Web era) with someone who was a widely hated figure at one point in NYC. My acquaintance literally got death threats on his answering machine aimed at this individual.
- greglindahl 10y ago
  I had a roommate named John Edward Smith III. Aside from the III, this is basically the most common name in the US. There were 3 people with exactly his name (including the III!) in the University of Virginia database. If you're going to change your legal name for privacy reasons, it's a good choice.
- thatwebdude 10y ago
  Likewise, I don't have a very common name at all, but after googling it, found many high-profile people who do. They help me hide way back in the search results.
LeicaLatte 10y ago
Do you have a phone number? Ever received a package? Do you pay taxes? Then you are already on the internet.
elastic_church 10y ago
First, change your names on social media accounts and then delete the account. Second, use the right to be forgotten laws in Europe (even if you aren't European). They've got Google by the balls and at the very least you'll be scrubbed from google pages in Europe, perhaps very soon - or not - you'll be scrubbed from Google worldwide. Third, might want to change your phone number. But at the very least, even if you have poor impulse control or are too attached to do the first step, just remove your phone numbers from your social media accounts. Uninstall those apps from your phone. Clear your cookies. The main goal is to disassociate your phone number from social. You inadvertently upload it in a variety of ways, and this is a key component to their graphs. Changing it is better because your friends upload your number anyway. Now you will have a new number and no social media profile linked to it. Fourth, be conscious of what/where you post. Now that you won't have privacy anxiety, this will be much easier to pay attention to. Fifth, at your leisure, send sternly worded 'remove this content' emails to any web pages that still reveal info about you. Don't do this from free email and gmail accounts, do it from more authoritative sounding domain names. But in the email, refer to yourself as "my client"
- DanBC 10y ago
  > Second, use the right to be forgotten laws in Europe (even if you aren't European). They've got Google by the balls and at the very least you'll be scrubbed from google pages in Europe, perhaps very soon - or not - you'll be scrubbed from Google worldwide. This isn't quite accurate. The search results are only removed for browsers within Europe. Google will only removed "outdated" or "irrelevant" search results. Google approve less than half the requests it gets for RtbF.
amelius 10y ago
Best is to first replace all your information on those services by fake information. Then create a bunch of accounts with the same name, and also enter fake information. Then delete all the stuff. Remember: you can decrease the signal-to-noise ratio by decreasing the signal, or by increasing the noise.
jcoffland 10y ago
Fake your own Internet death.
peterwwillis 10y ago
I'm pretty sure that claiming you want to drop off the grid just makes them want to track you more.
confounded 10y ago
- Google and Facebook currently allow you to delete your data, and both say that they really mean it. I doubt that this policy will be around in a few years, so it's worth taking advantage of now. Even if you want to still use these services, it's worth 're-incarnating' yourself without decades of data and phone numbers, email addresses, etc. tied to a name. This is easy for Google, but very difficult for Facebook; it's explicitly against their TOS, and algorithmically enforced. If you've got spare cash, it's easiest to buy a $40 dollar burner phone and do it over 4G; spare your IP address, and the sign-up flow is slick (paid for UA channel). - The email address, phone number, credit card number, and the SSN are still the canonical forms of identity in the data industry. You can almost always transact without an SSN, and the rest can be re-generated so that they don't follow you around, with some money and effort. For example, buy a burner domain, and use a different email address for each service (e.g. joespizza@user_id.lol). Abine Inc. (I'm a customer, no other affiliation) offer a service which: * Generates burner emails, and forwards mail to you * Gives you a virtual phone number which forwards calls and texts (but which you can ditch/rotate) * Virtual credit cards, no real name needed I rolled my own solution for the email thing, but the cards and telephone numbers work great. Making-up outlandish names to buy cinema-tickets and burritos with is still entertaining my wife and I after a whole year! They also have a service called 'DeleteMe' which I think is basically paying an intern to click-through all the opt-out forms of the data brokerages on your behalf.
- syrrim 10y ago
  If google and facebook - who make their money off data - are willing to delete data for free, then they probably have some legal mandate to do so. If so, then they will continue to allow deletion while the laws remain in place.
  - exolymph 10y ago
    What makes you think that they have a legal mandate, when so many other websites and services don't offer the option?
  - confounded 10y ago
    No.
ramtatatam 10y ago
There are companies that can help you removing your `digital shadow` - https://www.digitalshadows.com/the-digital-shadow/ https://www.digitalshadows.com/the-digital-shadow/ disclaimer - I happen to know digital shadow from event I once attended. I'm not associated with them and for that matter I had not used their product, however I find the idea pretty interesting and kinda cool :-)
welanes 10y ago
Time machine. Probably.
home_boi 10y ago
Is there anyway to delete/DMCA those white page websites (whitepages.com, spokeo, instantcheckmate, etc.) that list all your relatives and your past physical addresses?
- exolymph 10y ago
  No, because none of that information is protected by copyright. You could try contacting their CS.
closeparen 10y ago
You need to find a job that will hire you without I-9 verification, pay cash, and not withhold taxes or report your employment to the IRS. You need to sublet for cash (without the landlord's knowledge, so he doesn't generate any records like a lease) and not have your name on the apartment or any utility accounts. The banking system is loaded with KYC rules; you will need to steer clear of it. Do not get an ID at all unless the photo no longer resembles you and the address listed on it checked out at the time but is no longer considered a threat (remember that your old neighbors might sit with a sketch artist or remember a comment in passing about where you might be headed next). Obviously no car registration or driving. Switch transit fare cards frequently; be careful of the CCTV cameras on the farecard vending machines. Use distinct prepaid device for each call. Make your way to a pseudorandom location (the locations of all your calls plotted on a map should not let anyone infer the general vicinity of your home, workplace, or where you might surface next). Make the call over a unique Signal account, be brief, and securely destroy the phone. Obviously no flying, and especially no crossing international borders. You most certainly cannot do anything predictable like show up at your parents' house at Christmas. If you must use email, use Tails, use a different email address and PGP key for every message, come up on secondhand laptops over Tor on public wifi at places that can't individually identify laptop users mechanically, and places too busy to remember the faces of specific laptop users. Obviously, social media of any form, any sort of communication (even letter-writing) with people who won't apply this tradecraft as carefully as you every single time with no exceptions ever, legitimate employment, anything licensed, and anything related to the banking system are totally out of the question. ... by now it should be clear that "dropping off the grid" is almost certainly not what you want to do, and that 95% of what you have to fear from "the grid" has been here long before social media and doesn't care that you deleted your Facebook account, because it is integral to every part of life. The relation name ~ face ~ residence ~ phone ~ email ~ occupation ~ employer ~ financials is probably not something you actually want to "erase" or keep secret, unless you are willing to go to extreme lengths. And at that point, the government's "someone is using tradecraft" senses will likely go off, and they'll likely come at you with some old fashioned human intelligence work that your Hacker News sensibilities won't protect you against. You might want to think more deliberately about which pieces of information you're trying to disassociate from that relation, because that's a much more tenable project.
baccheion 10y ago
Don't put it on the internet to begin with.
gspetr 10y ago
- Facebook account is like herpes, it stays with you for life. - No, Facebook is worse. - How? - Herpes goes away when you die.
WhiteSource1 10y ago
Impossible to completely delete yourself - especially with things like the Internet Archive, so even if you delete current pages, there'll be an archive. Best thing is delete all your accounts, request any mentions of you to be removed, and as others said change your name so that things like Zoominfo and bots don't pick up on you.
christianbryant 10y ago
The question stems from a hypothetical problem. A person who works undercover, let's say, and has a fairly unique name, is concerned that their real name, if ever revealed, could be searched and then the associations to family and friends revealed from this search be used to either coerce the undercover person to work against the law, or simply to hurt the associated family and friends in retaliation for duty performed. The agency for which the undercover person works does not aid in any way the cleaning up of public data available against the person's true identity.

ZitchDog 10y ago

I don't think there's any way. There are too many identity aggregators. I think the only way would be to create lots of fake profiles and fake information tied to your name, thereby drowning out the signal.

eterm 10y ago

Don't try to change the internet, just change everything else. Move country, change your name, change the industry in which you work and change the hobbies in which you are interested. Change the clothes you wear and your style of haircut. All of that is a lot easier than trying to track down all lose-ends over the internet. You won't escape state-level actors if that is your concern but you'll have some distance between your offline and online history.

yarou 10y ago
I don't think he's suggesting to revise the protocols of the Internet. He's merely asking for a method to delete his online footprints, in which case there are many services to accomplish this task.
- AznHisoka 10y ago
  .. and that is precisely what the parent is recommending. Changing your personal information is the antithesis of revising the protocols of the internet.
- ryanlol 10y ago
  > He's merely asking for a method to delete his online footprints, in which case there are many services to accomplish this task There are not. Unless you're willing to spend millions, of course.
  - nstj 10y ago
    Link? Quote? Article describing services which cost millions to deindex a person?
    - invalidOrTaken 10y ago
      That's the point. Sometimes "not for sale" means incredibly cheap, like air. Sometimes it means "not available in standardized fashion," like trips to the moon.
      - nstj 10y ago
        For sure, completely understood, but it's hard to say that something exists without giving some kind of evidence that it actually does.
    - ryanlol 10y ago
      Yeah, it's called hiring a law firm.
      - nstj 10y ago
        Partner at a global law firm charges ~$1k/hr, this would take 500 hrs of their time and 1000 hrs of an associates? Seems a bit vague?
        ryanlol 10y ago
        >Partner at a global law firm charges ~$1k/hr, this would take 500 hrs of their time and 1000 hrs of an associates? Doesn't seem all that unrealistic considering you probably won't have much legal ground to stand on. >Seems a bit vague? Yeah, that's the whole point...
- disordinary 10y ago
  Can you point out some of these services? It seems that they are exactly what the poster is looking for.
Fraterkes 10y ago
Its an interesting take on the problem, but it seems a bit exagerated that taking on a completely new identity in a different country is a lot easier than hunting down and deleting some old accounts.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
ChuckMcM 10y ago
Seriously, this is the best advice. It has been used for literally hundreds of years as people changed their name and moved to a new town to escape a reputation or community memory where they lived. But if you want to be more deliberate about it, then the question you have to ask are "Who would be looking for you on the Internet and not like what they found?" That runs the gamut from old classmates to people you're dating to current or future employers to federal agents. Stay off Facebook and legally change your name, that will protect you from old classmates. If you're running away from bad reviews on dating sites you may need to change your name, move, and change your haircut and appearance. If you are worried about employers you'll probably need to change your social security or taxpayer ID. That gets into the realm of felony territory so you're going to want to be thoughtful about that. Without it though the IRS can connect all the dots and there are various ways background checks can do the same thing. The alternative might be to try fuzzing, basically create a bunch of accounts with your name and be different people on each of them. That has the down side of obviousness in terms of obfuscation.
- bsder 10y ago
  > If you're running away from bad reviews on dating sites God, the fact that this is a thing makes me shake my head ...
  - nsgi 10y ago
    Is it? I thought most people used pseudonyms anyway.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
jasonkostempski 10y ago
You won't even have to go further than this site to run into obstacles, you can't delete your HN account, I've tried. And, like me, OP seems to have used their real name.
- closeparen 10y ago
  What do you think deleting your HN account would accomplish? All your comments will still be there, and likely backed up by Google Cache, the Internet Archive, HN Search, and anyone else using the HN API. "Delete my account" may be feel-good symbolism but AFAICT it rarely if ever makes a real difference to the subject (other than emotionally).
- 464192002d7fe1c 10y ago
  Technically I also used my real name as my account name... just the md5 of my name :)
- gaius 10y ago
  Yeah, this is an issue for those of us who came online in a different era of the Internet. Nowadays people can and should assume that the Internet is actively hostile and malicious before they even log in for the very first time. We grew up in a far more innocent age. Loads of us used our real names on Usenet for example because it simply never occurred to us that someone was archiving it all, after all, why would anyone even want to do such a thing? And who had the money for it? And they didn't tell anyone they were doing it until years after they started, which was in very poor taste.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    Even way back when, archives of Usenet postings were a thing. (Although it wasn't really systematically or completely archived.) Perhaps many people didn't fully appreciate how things they wrote under their True Names could be out there "forever." Or they assumed that Usenet was pretty much an exclusive club and things they wrote wouldn't be visible to the general public. But I'm not sure why someone posting on Usenet would assume that whatever they wrote was ephemeral and wouldn't be seen by anyone else a few years hence.
aq3cn 10y ago
MS, Apple and Google has biometric information about you, how will you avoid that? That's the reason I am against fingerprint scanner in iPhone or Macbook as they associate it with Apple ID for transaction. I don't know if facial recognition by MS in Surface associates that information with email id. Joke: Nuke fb, ggle, crapple etc.

maccard 10y ago

For those of us who aren't looking to totally drop off the grid, but are concerned about their online footprint and privacy online; check out https://www.privacytools.io https://www.privacytools.io (not affiliated). It's a good starting point for choosing trusted third party services. I'd be interested in other responses or advice for people who try and do the same.

thatwebdude 10y ago
Nice resource, I like the endorsement by GG. Will definitely be checking it out...

anondon 10y ago

The problem is that the user has no control over his data, so you are at the mercy of the service provider. Surprisingly, a lot of websites/services don't even give you the option to delete your account. Best method to delete yourself from the internet: * make a list of all services you are on * if a service lets you delete your account, delete it * if there is no delete option, email customer support and ask them to delete your account. Most sites will not create a fuss about it though it takes time and lots of back and forth with the customer support * search for yourself on google and ask google to remove links to your profiles(social media). They won't remove links to eg- articles about you, since it does not belong to you Depending on how generous you were with your personal info, it is most likely not possible to delete yourself completely. Funny story: I had a LinkedIn account where I signed up with only my email ID and gave no personally identifiable info(like a fake account). A few days later I get an SMS from LinkedIn telling me person XYZ sent me a request or something. How the f_uck did you get my number? To say the least, that scared me so I deleted the account. Also note that when a service deletes your account and data, it is more often a soft delete so your data is still with them. Good luck getting a hard deletion of your account/data.

rawnlq 10y ago
For example you can't even delete your comments/account on hacker news
- tokenizerrr 10y ago
  Luckily not. I've seen what happens on Reddit when people do that, and it's awful. Come back to an old thread and it's full of [deleted] and "This comment has been deleted by a script blablabla by the way fuck you"
  - CM30 10y ago
    This is also why most online community/forum owners don't let users delete their own posts (or in a lot of cases, delete their account). Because it makes the content real hard to read/make sense of if some of it randomly goes missing for whatever reason.

antidaily 10y ago

Sounds like a great SaaS product. Get to work, guys.

Lordarminius 10y ago
> Sounds like a great SaaS product... maybe not so much because any measure you come up with will be met by countermeasures from the data aggregators and your business model is reliant on the companies complying with your data deletion request
greglindahl 10y ago
There are already several SaaS products in this space. They do things like: (1) giving you instructions for deleting yourself on sites that allow it, (2) flood the Internet with fake content about your name, (3) file (potentially bogus) DMCA notices/RTBF requests for stuff that wasn't buried by (1) and (2). It's called "reputation management" by some. As an example of (3), sites like Ripoff Report won't remove info, but, if you can get a copyright logo or photo onto a Ripoff Report page, you can DMCA google & have the entire page unindexed.

tyingq 10y ago

If the purpose is to make it hard for a 3rd party to use internet searches to find out information about you, there's an easier way. Instead of the impossible task of making web pages with your name go away, instead, flood the internet with fake information tied to your name and identity. Create profiles with your real name, but everything else faked on popular sites. They'll have a better chance of crowding out pages you want to push down in search results if you make them actually valuable, versus just junk profiles. For example, a fake github identity, but with some actual useful project hosted there carries more weight. Or a profile (your name, faked job, faked photo) on LinkedIn that's tied to actual, insightful posts. Not easy to do in a way that's there's enough volume to crowd out whatever you're trying to hide. But, it's certainly easier than trying to convince third parties to take down existing web pages.

whatshisface 10y ago
The interested party could just look at the timestamps and ignore everything posted after the date when contradictory information began to appear.
- tyingq 10y ago
  There are some platforms that allow for backdating posts and/or dates. I'm pretty sure github is in that category, as is wordpress.com, etc. You might also have some existing accounts that you could edit/repurpose.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  That wouldn't work if you also moved and changed phone numbers -- the correct information would be new, along with the fake.
  - whatshisface 10y ago
    If you moved and changed addresses without publishing your new location, (and if this was all you were trying to obscure), you would have no need to begin an elaborate chaffing campaign - the internet would already not know your address!

iamthepieman 10y ago

You have to consider who you are trying to hide from. Hiding something in the face of an active pursuer is an act of aggression or at least, counter-aggression. In warfare there is the concept of enemy combatant. An ethical force will adhere to the idea that they only actively pursue and disable combatants not merely resistors, demonstrators or those taking countermeasures to protect themselves. Some people may be combatants by things other than actions of violence. Wearing an enemy uniform even if you are not holding a rifle or actively participating in a battle, spying, providing serious material aid to the combatants etc. I think these are apt comparisons to privacy and personal information because having them is a sort of ephemeral habeas corpus (I'm aware of the contradiction). You 'have the person' (that's what habeas corpus literally means) in a digital/information sense. Of course there's no exclusivity as there is with an actual bodily person. Warfare is ultimately about controlling the bodies - you kill the bodies and then you win. If more of your bodies are standing or if more of their bodies can be convinced to stop fighting or to come over to your side or just lose the will to fight then you win (trying to encompass more than just battlefield warfare here which is quickly becoming less important) So this very long winded setup is just to say that the "future of personal identity cleanup" is an oxymoron or at least a contradiction. "Hiding" whether digitally or otherwise is an ACTIVE thing. I guess the cleaning concept is useful to a degree. If I clean my kitchen then it stays clean...until I make dinner the next night - which, because I need to eat, I will inevitably do. And then it's just as messy and requires just as much effort as it did previously to clean. So unless you are dead, you can't just clean up your digital trail and be done. This is assuming that you want to go about living a relatively normal life and not smuggle yourself to an uninhabited island. So the future of digital privacy will be a series of compromises and trade offs. I don't want to be at all disrespectful about the situation in Syria because it is grief ridden disaster but I think this illustration is a good one. There are still people in Syria. You may think to yourself, "Why are people still in Syria? People with families". Because some people can't leave, some people don't think it's that bad for any number of reasons such as blind luck, blind faith or any other form of blindness. Regardless they are still there. And that's how digital privacy is. Most people won't care which means there won't be a demand which means you will stand out when you do demand (to be not seen) This is too long. TLDR: 1: TOOLS - tools to help you just like new kitchen gadgets. Some will be fads, some will be workhorses like the classic kitchenaid mixer and others will be just for pros or people with a passion for it. 2. KNOWLEDGE - Knowing how to hide what you really want to hide. This is going to be helped more and more by tech. People who don't want to hide anything won't ever know about these but those who do will. Starts with VPNS, separate accounts, never bringing a device with an EMF signal to certain places, how to use strong encryption etc. but includes basic digital tradecraft. 3: COMPROMISE - Don't ever use social media. Or do and realize that part of your life is never going to get a privacy cleanup. It's the fryolator of your digital life. Makes things delicious, unhealthy and never clean. Other compromises and realizing that just like credit, it's hard to repair mistakes in digital privacy. The question is so simple. . . . I wish the answer was. Sorry this is so rambling. I was going to include a why you should listen to me section but then I'd have to tell you who I am.

idlewords 10y ago

The answer depends a lot on location... where do you live, and what's your full name?

Duckpaddle2 10y ago
Ha Ha :>O
Someone 10y ago
The profile page for user christianbryant links to a page on darkreading.com that claims the name for that user is Christian Bryant, so, if the name isn't Christian Bryant, he (or maybe 'she'?) shows another way to 'delete' information about oneself from the internet: bury it in misinformation. That's a lot of work and won't erase everything, but it can help.
- softawre 10y ago
  Swoosh

petilon 10y ago

In the United States, if you register to vote your name, age, address, and the names of people who live at the same address all end up on https://voterrecords.com https://voterrecords.com and they don't let you remove it. If you are 40+ this may subject you to age discrimination--you may not even make it to the interview stage. I am now looking into how I can unregister to vote. If you fill in an application to rent an apartment, or purchase property, your information ends up on the internet. Our laws need to be updated for the internet age. There is public interest in knowing who owns the property at a certain address, but the reverse lookup of the same information--where does a certain citizen live--should be made illegal without the permission of the citizen.

adventurer 10y ago
The site has a link at the bottom of user pages to opt-out. They keep you listed but remove your address and telephone number.
- petilon 10y ago
  The opt-out is for information they added on top of what is in your voter record. They don't let you opt out of information that's in your voter record.
  - nommm-nommm 10y ago
    Because your voting record is public information.
    - krishanath 10y ago
      Sure, but we need new laws on how public information can be used. Just because you want to register to vote shouldn't mean your date of birth can now be made freely available to identity thieves and potential employers who can use the info to discriminate against you.
      - 10y ago

iamthepieman 10y ago

Off the grid is a good phrase. Have you ever tried living off the electrical grid? You either spend a ton of money building your own "grid" so your life doesn't have to change or your life becomes radically different from everyone else you used to know including yourself.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

known 10y ago

Repairing Online Reputation? https://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/02/17/1824232/repairing--establishing-online-reputation https://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/02/17/1824232/repairing--e...

koksik202 10y ago

I had sent emails to websites I held accounts for but I forgot logins to e.g. myspace to delete my content and they did :) I was not happy with pictures I posted years ago just before my interview after finishing college. I have active social network accounts I m not paranoid about the information there

dbg31415 10y ago

I have a fairly unique name. Anyway 5 years ago I was on a date, met the girl online. She started asking me about places I had lived... and she just knew way too much about me. She confessed she had paid like $20 to look me up on one of those extended search services before the date. There was no second date. Totally creeped me out... but I did get the name of the service she used, and when I got home I ran a search on myself to see what all was there. What's worse than all the information being out there, or parallel I guess, is that the shitty service had a bunch of information wrong. It said I lived in a state where I co-signed a lease for my sister (and since I have the same last name as my sister the service drew the conclusion we were married), it said that I still owned a home in yet another state (I had sold it years before)... It also returned my year-by-year income (most of which was fairly accurate), court records (even from when I was a little kid showing up at my parents' divorce hearing), and the exact amount I still owed on my house. No clue how they got all that shit. Around that time I went looking for ways to purge it all, I stumbled across this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/j1mit/how_to_remove_yourself_from_all_background_check/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/j1mit/how_to_re... I filled out every opt-out form I could find. Here we are, 5 years later... I can say... a few less scammy sites show up when you search for me... but on the whole not really much impact. A bunch of information these sites have is still wrong, and a lot of the sites... even if you go through all the trouble of opting out... they only honor the opt-out for a year. I asked my lawyer if there was a way, how do celebrities and such keep their records out of these people's hands... and his response was, "You probably have to contact each site and pay then to take you off..." At which point I decided to cheer if anyone ever fire-bombed the offices of Radaris or Spokeo or Yatedo or any of the other shit-information sites. We need laws that make it legal for us to all kick the CEO of these companies in the nuts -- one good solid kick each. Freedom of information, all that... necessary for democracy... and it's just a short hop from there over to aggregation services... but we should at least ensure that people who want to profit off eroding privacy shouldn't be able to reproduce. Seems like there was an update to that post. https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/31u84n/how_to_remove_yourself_from_most_background_check/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/31u84n/how_to_r...

contingencies 10y ago

k-mcgrady 10y ago

Recently I decided to try to 'remove myself from the internet'. I just wanted to be a bit more private personally. The best way I could come up with was to Google myself, go through the first 2-3 pages and work on removing that data. So I had to get some stuff removed from Crunchbase (had to email them for this), delete my Twitter, tell Facebook not to let search engines index me (same for LinkedIn). I also changed from using my real name to using a handle on some services (e.g. GitHub). It too some time but recently I had a new friend tell me they were trying to find me online and couldn't so it was quite a successful approach.

dorianm 10y ago
Nice! Yes that's quite a good method. I also found that googling my name + some relevant keywords (like ruby, programming, resume, etc. in my case) found relevant results
- ryandrake 10y ago
  Fortunately my name is fairly common, and a google search for it alone shows no links related to me, well past page 10 or so of results, so horay for good opsec. Use the right keywords though and you can still find me. A good newbie approach is to start by not using any of the popular social media stuff (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) and if you do, make sure it has no information about you or fake information. EDIT: Of course I acknowledge a determined attacker could obtain all sorts of info about me. Not bragging or inviting doxxing, kthx.

slvrspoon 10y ago

we've run this service for a number of years and processed probably a million or so opt-outs successfully. nothing "deletes you from the web" obviously, but happy to answer any questions from anyone: https://www.abine.com/deleteme/landing.php https://www.abine.com/deleteme/landing.php

the-dude 10y ago

You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave ...

thatwebdude 10y ago
"You can deactivate any time you like, but you can never delete!..." (Guitar solo...)

manumit 10y ago

The only way to win is to never have played. At this point, forget about data privacy. If the data is out there, it's out there and you're never going to change that. The best you can hope for is for the actual practical consequences to be mitigated by effective legal constraints on what people can do to you based on your data. In the US, there are a few examples of this kind of protection - the Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act prohibits genetic information being used to deny/price health insurance coverage, or to discriminate in employment. The Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) prohibits denial of health insurance coverage for (or due to) pre-existing conditions. (Note that life insurance in the US is not covered by these laws, so people who may ever need life insurance coverage would be ill-served by ANY kind of genetic testing for any reason - the information can only hurt you. And god help you if you have a bad credit rating; in most places you won't be able to get a decent job or housing.) Many European countries have better protections against discrimination in housing, employment, and insurance coverage on the basis of personal data (in addition to granting individual rights over that data held by third parties.) As an American who suffered identity theft in the US and suffered all kinds of hassles for years as a result, the single thing that ameliorated them best was leaving the USA and moving to an EU member state.

Tempest1981 10y ago

In 4th grade, they started teaching kids about their "digital tattoo". A reasonable analogy -- like a tattoo, it's very hard to erase whatever you put out there. Non-profit: http://www.mydigitaltat2.org http://www.mydigitaltat2.org

thatwebdude 10y ago
Props 4 da super cool naming.

phkahler 10y ago

Distributed social media where all your posts are on your own private server/NAS box next to your router. This means only people you "connect with" will have access. No companies will collect data. At the time of your choosing you can just delete your info. This doesn't prevent your friends from making copies, but they usually won't. As for sites like HN, use an alias so the posts can't be connected back to the real you. That's hard to put leakage, so let's try to create such sites so that when an account is deleted it really is. Not sure how to ensure that.

an_account 10y ago
While this seems like a good way to limit online exposure, OP seems to be asking how delete online exposure after being a more typical internet user.
rhizome 10y ago
You just described a major feature of the imaginary federated social network I've been designing in my head for the past several years: you have a "profile information provider" (your phone, a third-party website) that you subscribe into your various social networks, SNs then existing only to provide a social graph within their context. Your personal info then remains under your control (as the idea goes) with access granted and revoked at will.

id122015 10y ago

First, delete all the content you published and social network accounts like I did. Change the name first of those accounts to be sure that if they wont totally delete your account, it will not be your name in the system. In the case of some websites you may be able to convince the owners to delete the content you posted. Some other websites, might not be easily convinced, but you can bait them with money to achieve your goal. I did all that. Currently the only place my full name shows on the internet in on Companies House, because they keep those records, for almost 20 years after you close a company. And those same records get published by third parties also. Other than that, I'm GHOSTING.

thatwebdude 10y ago
Are we sure social networks aren't versioning almost every piece of metadata about you? After all, storage is cheap.

givinguflac 10y ago

If I want to remove something, I edit as much of it as possible to be underscores and/or fake/nonsense, then delete the comment/account. So unless the service keeps various versions of the same comment (some may, many don't) that info is effectively gone.

darkhorn 10y ago

http://backgroundchecks.org/justdeleteme/ http://backgroundchecks.org/justdeleteme/

Tempest1981 10y ago

If you do change your name/identity/city, do you also switch careers? How do you approach applying for jobs? Do you make a fake resume/CV? Or just a new empty one focused more on "skills" vs job history? And what do you say when they ask about job experience? Honesty, I guess, but it might make them curious/suspicious/nosey.

cm2187 10y ago

Give all service providers a unique email, and a fake name. It will be very hard to correlate your identity between two providers. And most providers don't need your real name.

z3t4 10y ago

change your name, email adress and phone nr.

invaliduser 10y ago

"John Smith" I personally found that having a very very common name provides a lot of privacy. If you look me up by my real firstname/lastname, you'll find out we are borg, we are 1000s, and I'm burried somewhere far and deep in the search results.

ghaff 10y ago
For better or worse, having a very common name is one of the best ways to hide. By contrast, my name is effectively unique (at least among people who have any web presence). The worst of both world though is probably having an almost unique name that you share with someone notorious who could plausibly be you for reasons of age, location, etc. I once knew someone who shared names (in the pre-Web era) with someone who was a widely hated figure at one point in NYC. My acquaintance literally got death threats on his answering machine aimed at this individual.
greglindahl 10y ago
I had a roommate named John Edward Smith III. Aside from the III, this is basically the most common name in the US. There were 3 people with exactly his name (including the III!) in the University of Virginia database. If you're going to change your legal name for privacy reasons, it's a good choice.
thatwebdude 10y ago
Likewise, I don't have a very common name at all, but after googling it, found many high-profile people who do. They help me hide way back in the search results.

LeicaLatte 10y ago

Do you have a phone number? Ever received a package? Do you pay taxes? Then you are already on the internet.

elastic_church 10y ago

First, change your names on social media accounts and then delete the account. Second, use the right to be forgotten laws in Europe (even if you aren't European). They've got Google by the balls and at the very least you'll be scrubbed from google pages in Europe, perhaps very soon - or not - you'll be scrubbed from Google worldwide. Third, might want to change your phone number. But at the very least, even if you have poor impulse control or are too attached to do the first step, just remove your phone numbers from your social media accounts. Uninstall those apps from your phone. Clear your cookies. The main goal is to disassociate your phone number from social. You inadvertently upload it in a variety of ways, and this is a key component to their graphs. Changing it is better because your friends upload your number anyway. Now you will have a new number and no social media profile linked to it. Fourth, be conscious of what/where you post. Now that you won't have privacy anxiety, this will be much easier to pay attention to. Fifth, at your leisure, send sternly worded 'remove this content' emails to any web pages that still reveal info about you. Don't do this from free email and gmail accounts, do it from more authoritative sounding domain names. But in the email, refer to yourself as "my client"

DanBC 10y ago
> Second, use the right to be forgotten laws in Europe (even if you aren't European). They've got Google by the balls and at the very least you'll be scrubbed from google pages in Europe, perhaps very soon - or not - you'll be scrubbed from Google worldwide. This isn't quite accurate. The search results are only removed for browsers within Europe. Google will only removed "outdated" or "irrelevant" search results. Google approve less than half the requests it gets for RtbF.

amelius 10y ago

Best is to first replace all your information on those services by fake information. Then create a bunch of accounts with the same name, and also enter fake information. Then delete all the stuff. Remember: you can decrease the signal-to-noise ratio by decreasing the signal, or by increasing the noise.

jcoffland 10y ago

Fake your own Internet death.

peterwwillis 10y ago

I'm pretty sure that claiming you want to drop off the grid just makes them want to track you more.

confounded 10y ago

- Google and Facebook currently allow you to delete your data, and both say that they really mean it. I doubt that this policy will be around in a few years, so it's worth taking advantage of now. Even if you want to still use these services, it's worth 're-incarnating' yourself without decades of data and phone numbers, email addresses, etc. tied to a name. This is easy for Google, but very difficult for Facebook; it's explicitly against their TOS, and algorithmically enforced. If you've got spare cash, it's easiest to buy a $40 dollar burner phone and do it over 4G; spare your IP address, and the sign-up flow is slick (paid for UA channel). - The email address, phone number, credit card number, and the SSN are still the canonical forms of identity in the data industry. You can almost always transact without an SSN, and the rest can be re-generated so that they don't follow you around, with some money and effort. For example, buy a burner domain, and use a different email address for each service (e.g. joespizza@user_id.lol). Abine Inc. (I'm a customer, no other affiliation) offer a service which: * Generates burner emails, and forwards mail to you * Gives you a virtual phone number which forwards calls and texts (but which you can ditch/rotate) * Virtual credit cards, no real name needed I rolled my own solution for the email thing, but the cards and telephone numbers work great. Making-up outlandish names to buy cinema-tickets and burritos with is still entertaining my wife and I after a whole year! They also have a service called 'DeleteMe' which I think is basically paying an intern to click-through all the opt-out forms of the data brokerages on your behalf.

syrrim 10y ago
If google and facebook - who make their money off data - are willing to delete data for free, then they probably have some legal mandate to do so. If so, then they will continue to allow deletion while the laws remain in place.
- exolymph 10y ago
  What makes you think that they have a legal mandate, when so many other websites and services don't offer the option?
- confounded 10y ago
  No.

ramtatatam 10y ago

There are companies that can help you removing your `digital shadow` - https://www.digitalshadows.com/the-digital-shadow/ https://www.digitalshadows.com/the-digital-shadow/ disclaimer - I happen to know digital shadow from event I once attended. I'm not associated with them and for that matter I had not used their product, however I find the idea pretty interesting and kinda cool :-)

welanes 10y ago

Time machine. Probably.

home_boi 10y ago

Is there anyway to delete/DMCA those white page websites (whitepages.com, spokeo, instantcheckmate, etc.) that list all your relatives and your past physical addresses?

exolymph 10y ago
No, because none of that information is protected by copyright. You could try contacting their CS.

closeparen 10y ago

You need to find a job that will hire you without I-9 verification, pay cash, and not withhold taxes or report your employment to the IRS. You need to sublet for cash (without the landlord's knowledge, so he doesn't generate any records like a lease) and not have your name on the apartment or any utility accounts. The banking system is loaded with KYC rules; you will need to steer clear of it. Do not get an ID at all unless the photo no longer resembles you and the address listed on it checked out at the time but is no longer considered a threat (remember that your old neighbors might sit with a sketch artist or remember a comment in passing about where you might be headed next). Obviously no car registration or driving. Switch transit fare cards frequently; be careful of the CCTV cameras on the farecard vending machines. Use distinct prepaid device for each call. Make your way to a pseudorandom location (the locations of all your calls plotted on a map should not let anyone infer the general vicinity of your home, workplace, or where you might surface next). Make the call over a unique Signal account, be brief, and securely destroy the phone. Obviously no flying, and especially no crossing international borders. You most certainly cannot do anything predictable like show up at your parents' house at Christmas. If you must use email, use Tails, use a different email address and PGP key for every message, come up on secondhand laptops over Tor on public wifi at places that can't individually identify laptop users mechanically, and places too busy to remember the faces of specific laptop users. Obviously, social media of any form, any sort of communication (even letter-writing) with people who won't apply this tradecraft as carefully as you every single time with no exceptions ever, legitimate employment, anything licensed, and anything related to the banking system are totally out of the question. ... by now it should be clear that "dropping off the grid" is almost certainly not what you want to do, and that 95% of what you have to fear from "the grid" has been here long before social media and doesn't care that you deleted your Facebook account, because it is integral to every part of life. The relation name ~ face ~ residence ~ phone ~ email ~ occupation ~ employer ~ financials is probably not something you actually want to "erase" or keep secret, unless you are willing to go to extreme lengths. And at that point, the government's "someone is using tradecraft" senses will likely go off, and they'll likely come at you with some old fashioned human intelligence work that your Hacker News sensibilities won't protect you against. You might want to think more deliberately about which pieces of information you're trying to disassociate from that relation, because that's a much more tenable project.

baccheion 10y ago

Don't put it on the internet to begin with.

gspetr 10y ago

- Facebook account is like herpes, it stays with you for life. - No, Facebook is worse. - How? - Herpes goes away when you die.

WhiteSource1 10y ago

Impossible to completely delete yourself - especially with things like the Internet Archive, so even if you delete current pages, there'll be an archive. Best thing is delete all your accounts, request any mentions of you to be removed, and as others said change your name so that things like Zoominfo and bots don't pick up on you.

christianbryant 10y ago

The question stems from a hypothetical problem. A person who works undercover, let's say, and has a fairly unique name, is concerned that their real name, if ever revealed, could be searched and then the associations to family and friends revealed from this search be used to either coerce the undercover person to work against the law, or simply to hurt the associated family and friends in retaliation for duty performed. The agency for which the undercover person works does not aid in any way the cleaning up of public data available against the person's true identity.