There are many reasons you might want to “delete yourself” from the internet. From receiving frustrating amounts of spam to protecting yourself from carefully crafted scams fueled by the availability of personal data. But it goes much deeper than that.
Having your personal information floating around online leaves you more vulnerable to identity theft, a type of fraud that can lead to criminals opening lines of credit in your name. Stalkers can use location and other data to commit their crimes. Even the seemingly more mundane uses of personal data can be enough to make you want to delete yourself from the internet.
You might find loan applications being inexplicably rejected, insurance premiums going up or job searches getting drawn out. Companies checking your credit rating is one thing, but these effects could stem from inaccurate, outdated or irrelevant information being used in decision-making processes that affect you in very real ways.
What it means to “delete yourself from the internet”
We’re not talking about completely disappearing from the internet. For one, this is very difficult if not impossible to do, even if you were to throw near-unlimited resources at the problem. It’s also probably not something you’d want to do even if you could.
There’s a way you can keep making use of all the benefits the internet has to offer—like the unparalleled shopping, communication and information-sharing opportunities—without leaving yourself needlessly vulnerable to all the downsides.
The key is getting your personal information under control. You don’t need to delete yourself entirely, it’s often enough to remove your personal information from circulation. “Personal information” includes things like your:
- Current and past names, and any aliases
- Current and past addresses
- Email addresses
- Phone numbers
- Educational background
- Work history
- Income bracket
- Licenses
- Certifications
- Marital status
- Sexual orientation
- Financial information
- Criminal record
- Court records
- And much, much more.
Not exactly the kinds of details you’d want shady companies to package and resell behind your back, or put on Google Search so that anyone can buy access to them for as little as a dollar. There are two ways to tackle this problem, and you’ll need to do both to see long-term results:
- Figure out how you’re putting personal information online and bring it down to a level with which you’re comfortable
- Put a stop to companies grabbing and publishing or otherwise disseminating what personal data you do end up generating down the line.
Just going about your day-to-day business generates personal data that can then be scooped up by companies that know how to monetize it at your expense. Everything from doing some online shopping to selling a house or vehicle leaves traces.
Stop any personal information that’s already out there from being spread around
We’re starting here because you’ve already got personal information doing the rounds online—pretty much everyone does. So the first thing you’ll need to do is interrupt the flow of what’s already out there. There are a couple of things you can do to make this happen.
Stop companies packaging and selling your personal information online and off
There are companies—called data brokers—that specialize in collecting, organizing and selling personal information. They get your personal data by scraping the web, purchasing or otherwise acquiring ready-made profiles, or a combination of the two. The most visible data brokers are commonly known as “people finder” or “people search” sites.
You can see examples of these sites, and the information they have on you, simply by performing a web search for your full name, address or phone number. These sites will likely show you a free “teaser” of your profile, with the full records being locked behind a paywall.
It gets worse: people search sites are just the tip of the data brokerage iceberg. Many data brokers operate in the background, selling personal information to other businesses and organizations rather than putting it on websites aimed at individuals. You won’t find these companies by simply searching for your details, but they’re out there. Hundreds of them.
People search sites sell your data to anyone who’s willing to pay for access, including unscrupulous landlords, curious neighbours, nosy coworkers, stalkers, even scammers. Other data brokers will sell your data to:
- Advertisers
- Marketers
- Government agencies
- Insurance companies
- Banks
- Employers
- And many more.
Thanks to state privacy laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), you can do something about this. To comply with laws like this, data brokers have to have an opt-out procedure in place to give people caught up in their personal-data dragnets a clear way out.
You can track down these companies one by one and submit an opt-out request to each one. Some are just a matter of a couple of clicks and take 5 minutes to complete, others can be a real nightmare and can take 45 minutes or more. Add the time it takes to find them in the first place, and you’re looking at hundreds of hours in total.
Or, you can sign up for an automated personal information removal service, like Incogni. These services already know where to find some of the most connected brokers and how to submit opt-out requests in line with their requirements—because virtually every one has a different procedure to follow.
Incogni makes it easy for anyone to remove their personal information from being searched online. Subscribers get a 30-day moneyl-back guarantee on automated data removal services, including recurring removal from 220+ data broker sites. With flexible plans for just $7.49/month for one person (billed annualyy) or $16.49/month for the family plan, Incogni offers privacy protections against identity theft, scam robocalls, and exposure after breached data.
Remove your personal information from Google Search results
You’ve seen how a search engine can reveal your personal information to anyone who knows your name, address, email or phone number. With the latest “face-search” technology, they don’t even have to know that much, a surreptitiously taken photo is all it takes.
Google Search, with its monopoly over the search market, is likely the first place most people will look. Google won’t always agree to remove links from its search results and, even if it does, it can only remove links from Google Search: it can’t affect the content itself and it can’t stop that content from showing up on other search engines. To have content taken down at the source, you’ll need to contact the relevant webmaster.
Here’s a quick rundown of your options on Google Search:
- Use this form to remove outdated content
- Use this form to remove harmful or illegal content (as long as it violates Google’s terms of service)
- Finally, use this form to remove content that contains “select personally identifiable information (PII) or doxxing content.”
Stop new personal information from getting out into the wild
Stopping data brokers from buying and selling your data and getting Google Search to remove your personal information from its search results can only do so much if you keep allowing new personal information to appear online. “Allowing” might be a bit harsh, given that you might not be aware of how some of your data is getting out there. We’ll get to that.
Stop publishing personal information online
Social media platforms are careful to use words like “share” when encouraging users to publish content, including personal information. “Sharing” makes it sound like you have some control over who sees what you post. But “publishing” is more accurate: social media posts are public by default.
The best advice is as predictable as it is inconvenient: delete your social media accounts to protect your privacy and delete yourself from the internet. Short of doing that, here’s a list of things you can do to limit the damage:
- Switch from mainstream social media platforms like Facebook and X (Twitter) to decentralized and open-source platforms like Mastodon.
- Set any social media profiles you decide to keep to private mode, so that only people you know and trust can see your posts.
- Check and double-check anything you decide to post publicly for personal information, this will become second nature sooner than you might think.
- Turn location services off on mobile devices before posting, many social media platforms will grab this information from your device, some will append it to your posts.
- Check photos for anything that could reveal personal information, look out for reflections, documents, screens (that show private information), and unique identifiers like car registration plates.
- Strip photos of metadata—metadata is text that’s automatically attached to photos and contains a lot of information about the location at which the photo was taken as well as the device on which it was taken.
- Apply the same level of caution when uploading video and audio recordings.
The same holds true for any blogging or vlogging you do, the comments you leave on various platforms, and anything you post on forums.
Stop your devices from leaking personal information
The above best practices come into play when you’re actively publishing information online, but a lot of personal data leaves your devices when you’d least suspect it. Here are just some examples:
Apps and programs
Mobile apps and computer programs that have been granted access to location data, device information, microphone and camera inputs, and files (including documents, photos, videos and audio recordings) can leak personal information while you’re not even using them. Such apps and programs might have been set up to “dial home” periodically and upload your data. This might be necessary to support their features, or it might be to harvest data that’s then sold to advertisers in order to generate revenue—free apps are often monetized in this way.
Even apps developed with the most honest of intentions and collecting only the bare minimum of data can be hijacked by malicious actors (think: hackers) and have any data they have access to stolen (“breached”).
Delete any apps and programs you haven’t used in a while. For particularly data-hungry apps like Facebook, Amazon, and so on, consider using the respective websites instead.
Web browsers
Browsers are a special category of app or program, mainly because we do so much through a browser. They have access not only to hardware (like cameras and microphones), but also information (in the form of files) and—perhaps most importantly—to users’ behaviour and movements across the web. And no, “incognito” or “private” mode doesn’t do anything to help you here.
Diligently research any browser you decide to use. Options like Google’s Chrome are very secure but not private, whereas something like Mozilla’s Firefox is both secure and private. Stick to well-known and trusted browsers, avoid new browsers that don’t have an established track record, and watch out for browsers that had a good reputation in the past but have since changed hands.
Browser-based games
Games can take a lot of resources to develop and maintain, so you might wonder how so many impressive-looking browser-based games can be offered for free. Often, it’s by collecting and selling or otherwise monetizing personal information. Avoid free online, especially browser-based, games. Be particularly wary of games with development teams from countries like China and Russia.
Again, even games produced by the most trustworthy and well-intentioned developers can be breached by third parties. Any stockpile of personal data is going to be a target for hackers and other bad actors.
Operating systems
This is one that’s more for the technically minded, but it’s worth keeping in mind for everyone. The operating system on your device (whether Windows, macOS, Android or iOS) has access to everything you do on that device. Both Microsoft and Apple harvest personal data from their users, and both have business interests in protecting that data from competitors and bad actors.
There are two problems here: Microsoft and/or Apple having vast stores of your personal data is a bad thing in and of itself, and neither company is able to guarantee the security of that data—both have suffered and continue to suffer data breaches.
Alternatives exist, mainly in the form of Linux and the BSDs. These operating systems are open-source, meaning that anyone can review their source code to look for security vulnerabilities and privacy threats. As a result of this transparency, and the general absence of corporate interests, these systems are both more secure and more private.
The catch is that these operating systems are unfamiliar to most people, and can take some getting used to. Although the Linux operating system in particular has many extremely user-friendly “versions” (called distributions) available, and almost all of them are readily given away, free of charge.
Stop your online accounts from leaking personal information
We covered how publishing personal information online can jeopardize your privacy, but you don’t have to actively post things yourself for the information to get out there. If you’re active online, and especially if you do a lot of online shopping, you can easily have hundreds of online accounts out there. Many of which you probably only used once, to grab that Black Friday deal, for example.
Apart from the fact that you’re effectively trusting dozens if not hundreds of companies to not misuse your data, you’re also trusting that they won’t leave that data unsecured, that they won’t be bought out by less scrupulous companies, and so on.
The solution is simple, but it might require some tedious work: delete any accounts you don’t need anymore. If you’ve been using a password manager (like Bitwarden), this shouldn’t be too difficult. Otherwise, search through your emails for keywords like “welcome” and “verification” to ferret out evidence of old accounts.