Erasing Your Digital Footprint: A Guide to Removing Yourself from the Internet

While you can’t delete your personal information from the internet entirely, you can take strong steps to remove it from risky places. Several where others could tap into it for profit or harm. Why is it so important to take control of our personal information? It has street value, and it has for some time now. Because so much of business, finance, healthcare, and life in general runs on it, your personal information has a dollar sign to it. Plenty of people want to get hold of it. Personal info fuels targeted advertising and marketing campaigns, just as it helps adjusters set insurance rates and healthcare providers make projections about our well-being. Businesses want it for employment background checks. Law enforcement uses it when investigating persons of interest. Banks and credit card companies base their approvals on it. Websites and apps collect it for their own purposes, which they sometimes share or sell to third parties. And of course, hackers, scammers, and thieves want it too. To steal your identity, drain your accounts, and wage other attacks on you. No doubt, your personal information has value. High value. And that makes a strong argument for doing what you can to control what you share and where you share it to the best possible degree. With so much that hinges on your personal information, it’s good to know that you can take control in powerful ways. We’ll show how it’s far easier to do that today than ever before. Get to know your digital shadow. Taking control of your personal information starts with a look at your digital shadow. Everyone casts one. And like everyone else’s digital shadow, yours gets filled with information about you — personal information stored online across the internet. For starters, your digital shadow includes things like posts in forums, social media profiles, the posts that you put up there, and other people’s posts that mention you. It includes other sources of info, like pictures of you in an online newsletter, your name listed in the standings of your co-ed soccer league, and a bio of you on your company’s “About Us” page. Online reviews provide potential sources too. In all, this part of your digital shadow grows larger in two ways — as you say more things, and as more things are said about you. Your shadow grows even more with the addition of public records. That might include what you paid for your home, who lives there with you, your age, your children, your driving record, education, occupation, and estimated income. It all depends on where you live and what data regulations are in place there. Some regions have stricter privacy rules in place than others when it comes to public records. For example, in the US, California, Virginia, Connecticut, Colorado, Utah, Iowa, Indiana, Tennessee, Oregon, Montana, Texas, and Delaware have strong data privacy laws on the books.. The European Union has its well-known GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, in place. Then there’s all manner of information about you gathered and sold by online data brokers. Data brokers pull hundreds of data points from public sources, not to mention private sources like supermarket club cards that track your shopping history. Other private sources include information from app developers and websites with less restrictive privacy policies when it comes to sharing and selling information. These data brokers sell personal information to anyone who will pay, including hackers, scammers, and spammers. Finally, a sizable swath of your shadow comes from information stored on the deep web. It forms the 95% of the internet that is not searchable. Yet, you probably take trips there daily. Any time you go through a paywall or use a password to access internet content, you’re entering the deep web. Examples include logging into your bank account, accessing medical records through your healthcare provider, or using corporate web pages as part of your workday. Even streaming a show can involve a trip to the deep web. None of that content is searchable. What’s in there, aside from your Netflix viewing history? Think of all the information that forms the basis of your credit score, your health history, your financial information, and all the information that websites and advertisers capture about you as you simply spend time online. That’s the deep web too. A subset of the deep web is the dark web. It’s not searchable as well, and it requires a special browser to access. Some of the sites and data stores found there are entirely legitimate, others are questionable, and several are outright illegal. Some of your information might be there too. And yes, you’ll find dark marketplaces here where bad actors put up personal info for sale. Everyone online indeed has a digital shadow. And some shadows are longer than others. Taking control of your personal info matters, perhaps more than you think. So, what’s the big deal? That’s how the internet works, right? That’s a fair question. Part of the answer comes down to how important a person thinks their privacy is. Yet, more objectively, keeping a lower profile online offers better protection from cybercrime. Consider research published by the science journal Naturein 2019. Here’s an excerpt from the authors: Using our model, we find that 99.98% of Americans would be correctly re-identified in any dataset using 15 demographic attributes. Our results suggest that even heavily sampled anonymized datasets are unlikely to satisfy the modern standards for anonymization set forth by GDPR (Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation) and seriously challenge the technical and legal adequacy of the de-identification release-and-forget model. Put in practical terms, imagine a hacker or snoop gets their hands on a large set of public or private data. Like say, health data about certain medical conditions. Even though that data has been “scrubbed” to make the people in it anonymous, that hacker or snoop only needs 15 pieces of information to identify you in that mix. From there, they could pinpoint any health conditions linked to you. In a time when all kinds of organizations gather all kinds of data, the impact of this research finding is clear. Data breaches happen, and a determined person can spot you in a batch of breached data with relative ease. They have several tools readily available that can cobble together those other 15 pieces of information to identify you. That further strengthens the argument for taking control of your personal information. Deleting your information on the internet has its benefits. Shortening your so-called digital shadow helps improve everyday life in several ways. It can: Cut down the number of sketchy texts, emails, and calls you get. If a hacker, scammer, or spammer can’t track down your contact info, they can’t reach you on your computers and phones. Removing information from data broker sites, old accounts you no longer use, and even social media can make it harder for them to reach you. Reduce the risk of identity crimes, like theft, fraud, and harassment. Bad actors turn people’s information against them. With it, they take out loans in other people’s names, file bogus insurance claims, and, in more extreme cases, impersonate others for employment or criminal purposes. When you have less information online, they have less information to work with. That makes their attacks tougher to pull off. So tough that they might turn to another, easier target who has much more information online. Keep snoops out of your business when taking care of things online. Tracking and monitoring are simple facts of going online. Sites and businesses do it for performance and marketing purposes. Hackers and bad actors do it for outright theft. Taking steps to mask and outright hide your online activities benefits your privacy and your security. Take control of what people do and don’t know about you. Most broadly, increased privacy largely gives you the power to share your information. Not someone else. The fact is that many companies share information with other companies. And some of those other third parties might have looser data privacy and data security measures in place. What’s more, you likely have no idea who those third parties are. Increased privacy helps you take far more control of where your information does and doesn’t go. Five ways you can delete your information from the internet. The following can help: 1. Delete old apps. And…