How to Disappear from the Web
If you’ve ever been the victim of identity theft, or a stalker, or you just value your privacy, Tech Talker has the tools to help you ditch the digital age and remove your presence from the web.
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How to Disappear from the Web
If you haven’t done so in a while, try Googling yourself with a few key terms such as the city or state where you live. I bet you’ll be surprised by what comes up. But have you ever dug a little deeper? Have you ever searched images and videos? What about Googling your address?
If you’re not actively managing your online presence, odds are that there is a ton of information out there that you may not be aware of (or want to be public). Sometimes it’s more than just an embarrassing picture. It could be more private information such as your home address or your schedule..
Should You Disappear from the Web?
There are a number of reasons you might want to digitally disappear from the internet.
Say you’ve had enough of the NSA snooping, getting off the internet would be a pretty good start! Just be sure to never use a phone, have a picture taken of you, or be in any major city for a prolonged period of time. Sadly, that’s not a joke.
But in all seriousness, there might be other reasons why you’d want to erase some of your personal information from the web. Say you have a stalker? You definitely want to give them as few opportunities as possible to get to you. Or what if you’re trying clean up an online reputation to get a job, or perhaps you just want more privacy in your life? These are all valid reasons to want to disappear from the internet.
You may not want to disappear from the internet entirely, but you may want to remove some not so flattering information asap, so that it doesn’t jeopardize a job application, a potential relationship, or even your identity.
As for me, I’m definitely not going to be jumping off the internet anytime soon, and I’m not suggesting that you do it either. However, the easiest way to remove unwanted information from the internet is to not put it up there in the first place! I can’t begin to tell you how much trouble could be prevented if people just thought for a moment before posting personal stuff on social media.
Social Media Has Made Everything Public
Sometimes people unwittingly post information that can be used against them. For example, say you take a picture of your kids in your front yard and post it on social media. You may have included names and faces as tags so that family members and friends can see them. Sounds innocent, right? But what if you happened to get your home address or car license plate in the picture too?
If an individual were up to no good, it wouldn’t be hard to gather tons of personal information from a residence address and license plate number of the car. Worse yet is when people create locations of their home on social media so they can “check in.” That’s opening the doors to being able to gather information about that place and its residents.
Before the internet, information like this would have been much harder to obtain, and now people give it out without a second thought. Social media has made revealing personal information very easy and unremarkable. If you don’t believe me, play this game:
Go to a mall, park, or any other open public place. Use your mobile phone and an app like Tinder. This app takes your location and then uses it combined with Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to search for people around you. If you filter by real time posts, you can see people posting in real time from where you are. From there you can use their name to search their profiles and, if they don’t have their account locked down, you could potentially find a huge amount of information on them!
Okay, now I’ll stop lecturing about social media. Just be smart and think twice before posting anything.
Now let’s talk about how to actually remove information about yourself from the web…..
How to Remove Personal Information from the Web
The ability to delete yourself from the internet depends on a few things.
Firstly, how famous are you? If you’re like me and you don’t get invited to Taylor Swift’s birthday party, well it’s actually not that hard. But the more of an online presence you have, the more difficult it is to disappear. I imagine it would be nearly impossible for Lady Gaga or Beyonce to disappear from the internet (not that they’re trying to).
But if you’re not a world famous pop star and you’re determined to remove yourself from the web altogether, they key is to delete all of your social media accounts. That includes Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, MySpace, Xanga, Reddit, Pinterest, Google+, and anything and everything you’ve ever signed up for.
If you can’t remember all of the things you’ve signed up for, just search your email inbox for the words “Welcome” and “Verification.” These terms will generally create a pretty robust list of things you should cancel.
Next you’ll want to get rid of information that has been indexed by Google and other search engines. Just because you deleted your presence, Google will most likely have information from other websites that you can’t control.
The easiest way to do this is to contact the site directly and ask them to take down the information. If you’re polite and have pretty good reasoning, most websites will comply without much fuss.
Search engines like Google and Bing also have appeal forms where you can ask to have something removed from their search results. I’ve never had any luck with this, but it wouldn’t hurt to give it a try.
These first few steps are pretty easy if all you’re looking to do is to get your public self off the internet.
The next part is more difficult. Although you’ve deleted information that you’ve willingly released, there are a ton of websites that gather data about you and everyone else who has an online presence. For example just search for yourself on Spokeo.com or Pipl.com. There’s probably way more information on those websites than you could have ever imagined.
There are services such as DeleteMe that specialize in removing your information from these sources. But it’s far cheaper to do it yourself. Each of the sites that has information about you will liekly have a form that you can fill out to request a takedown of information. All it takes is time, patience, and persistence.
Now, depending on how far off the grid you want to go, the next step will be to start deleting email accounts, stop paying bills online, and to stop using online banking of any sort. This is a pretty drastic step, so make sure you’re really committed before you go down that road.
With that, here are your 4 Quick and Dirty Tips from disappearing from the web:
- It’s best to think twice before posting any information on social media, rather than managing triage after the fact.
- Be careful what information you release on the internet. You can never be sure how someone will use it for purposes you didn’t intend.
- If you really want to escape the web, remove yourself from social media altogether.
- If you want to go all the way, delete your email, online bank accounts, and turn off the computer and smartphone.
Hopefully, I’ve covered the whole spectrum of tools and options for ditching the digital age (without scaring you too much). If there’s anything I missed something, I’d love to hear about it. Just shoot me an email at techtalker@quickanddirtytips.comcreate new email or post it on the Tech Talker Facebook Page at Facebook QDTtechtalker (ironic, right?).
Well, that’s it for today! Be sure to check out all my earlier episodes at techtalker.quickanddirtytips.com.
Until next time, I’m the Tech Talker, keeping technology simple!
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Gone viral image courtesy of Shutterstock.
