5 ms·
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
by 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 agoI 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 agoLink? Quote? Article describing services which cost millions to deindex a person?
- invalidOrTaken 10y agoThat'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 agoFor sure, completely understood, but it's hard to say that something exists without giving some kind of evidence that it actually does.
- ryanlol 10y agoYeah, it's called hiring a law firm.
- nstj 10y agoPartner 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 agoCan you point out some of these services? It seems that they are exactly what the poster is looking for.
- Fraterkes 10y agoIts 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 agoSeriously, 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.
- jasonkostempski 10y agoYou 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 agoWhat 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 agoTechnically I also used my real name as my account name... just the md5 of my name :)
- gaius 10y agoYeah, 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 agoEven 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 agoMS, 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.