5 Ways to Erase Your Internet Presence

The big ones like Amazon, Facebook or Google, among others, know a lot about us through what we see on the web and thus they can know numerous data, such as the things we like, what we dislike, what we have searched for in the last days, of what we have discarded, etc.

All this data is used by different companies to offer us just what we are looking for or even to make us see that something is just what we want.

That is why many people want to choose to disappear from the network and completely remove themselves from the Internet, something that is very complicated or simply impossible, although we can limit our own impact on the network in the ways that we are going to tell you right now.

Data management companies

It is clear that the data collection is a business and also quite fruitful, hence there are so many companies in the world that are dedicated to it.

These data are essential for commercial strategy of many of the companies that operate on the Internet, since they rely on them to make changes to the very structure of their business in order to offer their potential customers the products or advertising that is most in line with what they are looking for.

These companies collect information such as our name, address, date of birth and even our habits on the Internet, in social networks or in relation to purchases.

As you can imagine, these data are pure gold for any company that wants to sell any type of thing, that is, knowing very closely what their customers are like and what to do, almost exactly, so that they notice their product, is priceless.

There are some of these companies that are famous internationally such as Acxiom, Oracle or Epsilon, among others. You can see several of them (231 in total) in the database that created Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a non-profit organization.

In Europe we are covered by the RGPD so we can require them to delete our data. From YourDigitalRights they have created opt-out forms for 10 of the biggest data brokers out there today.

Google results

Assuming that changing the way Google displays search results is impossible, we can take measures to ensure that at least data is up to date.

That is to say, that information from 10 years ago does not come out as current, something that can be extremely harmful for a user, in addition to not making sense.

If our data appears on a website and they are not updated, you can request that page to delete all that information. From there, Google itself already updates said data at the time the changes are significantly different from the versions it has previously indexed.

own Google deletes data that are harmful to us such as photos, fake pornography, financial data, medical data, private identifications, doxing, or impermissible photos of children. For more information about this we can enter the company help.

Delete old accounts

The Internet is not something from two days ago and those of us who have spent many years (exactly since it arrived in Spain) may have a lot of obsolete accounts on websites that either do not exist, or we have forgotten about them or have merged with others.

The fact of going looking for these old websites and records It is a task that will take hours, days or even months, since there are few and, worst of all, many of us no longer even know where we can look.

The first thing we can do is go through the email accounts that we remember, seeing if we can review and delete them. We can use websites like Justdelete.me, as it contains a list of removal links from many websites and emails.

If we do not remember more places where we have entered, we can choose to see the passwords saved in our browser or browsers to see if that can help us remember some other place where we can have an old account to delete.

We also have to look up our own name online and combine it with other personal data, for example, email address or where we live, to see what kind of information or record comes up.

Clear digital history

To massively clean accounts that we have old and thus have our digital history becoming lighter, ease will not be one of the characteristics of the process.

For example, if we have old Gmail accounts, we can always delete everything in bulk using the search command olden:than: and then adding the time we want (1 years, 10 months or 5 minutes, that as we see).

On Twitter it is much more complicated, although we can use websites like Tweet Deleter (paid) or TweetDelete for delete old tweets massively. Another option is delete twitter account completely, especially if it is not the one we currently use.

if we want do the same on facebook we should go to Settings and privacy, then to Activity Register and then select the type of activity that we want to delete, from our own posts to photos in which we are tagged. Although we have the same option as Twitter, that is, we can delete account directly.

For the rest of the platforms we must search in each one of them where we can do to delete everything that we have on them that is very old or delete the account so that there are no errors of any kind.

Obviously, if the accounts are old and are not the ones we currently use, our advice is to delete them, that way we make sure that nothing can happen to us.

Legally

The last option we have is to erase our fingerprints using the legal means available to us, for which we will have to seek advice from lawyers specialized in this matter and see what chance we have.

Obviously we can request that any type of information harmful to us, unauthorized photos or any type of content that could damage our image and honor be removed from the network.

There are services like DeleteMe that will try to eliminate all the data that there is in companies
of data collection that sell your information, although we can also do this by normal legality, that is, by means of a trial.

As you have been able to read, disappearing from the network is more complicated than it might seem at first, especially for those who have been there for many years, since many places where they were registered have disappeared or have been included in others.

Our data will always be on the network, but it is true that we can limit it or spend hours to eliminate everything that we remember.

We can also limit our action on the network with more private browsers or not accepting certain clauses of certain tools regarding the processing of our data (everything will depend on whether it continues to work) and even try to get a friend or family member to follow these guidelines, since a lot of information ours also comes from them.

The summary is obvious, you can try to disappear, but it costs a lot of time, sometimes money, and it is not possible to guarantee that there will not be 100% of our data.