Is It Possible To Erase Yourself From the Internet?

Barence writes "Do you remember what you posted on that music forum in 2004? Or which services you tried for webmail before Gmail? We often forget online services, but they don't forget us. PC Pro has investigated whether it's possible to retrospectively wipe yourself from the internet. It discusses how difficult it is to get your data removed from Facebook, Google and other popular web services, as well as reputation management services that promise to bury unwanted internet content on your behalf."

Comments

Feed the Monster Garbage

[MonkeyBot]

I was thinking about this earlier today while reading the article on Raytheon's Riot Program. I don't know if you can effectively remove yourself from the internet, but you might be able to muddy up your profiles with garbage to the point that the information that can be gleaned about you from the internet is of little or no value to a mass data harvester like Riot. I think this is the way to go in the future. You can't erase the data someone has already compiled about you, but you can feed the beast garbage until it vomits.

Re:change your name

[EvilSS]

Or pick one so popular that it's impossible to pick you out of all of the other John Smiths on the net.

Re:Step 1 - NEVER close an old email account

[magic maverick]

I can't say I do from 15 years ago, but I have done for the last 6 years at least. Every time I create a new account, I invariably record the details (including the fake DOB and mother's maiden name -- jokes on them, I'm a bastard) in a text file along with all the rest.

I also provide various fake email addresses (mailinator ftw) and record them.

Basically, I could prove that I (Dr. Janet J. Smithers) do in fact own three /. accounts, six Wikipedia accounts, various file sharing accounts, multiple Yahoo accounts, Google accounts, multiple forum accounts, etc. Even though I do not use the same pseudonym anywhere anymore (I provide a different one in every location). I also try and vary my writing style, here I'm literate. Over de i kant rite 2 gud. It makes it harder connect the dots I hope.

I also don't have Flash or Java plugin installed any longer, which limits attack vectors there. I limit JavaScript to certain domains. I have installed RequestPolicy and other privacy preserving plugins. Though I still find it strange I keep getting ads for chew toys...

The point of all that was, I can't remove myself from the Internet. E.g. to delete /. posts would require more effort than I feel like putting in. However, I can limit the damage by separating various parts of myself and making it harder to connect them. If I could delete forum posts from 2002 I would though.

Re:It's the New You

[sumdumass]

This is exactly true.

I used to play a game and we did a lot of outside the game strategical collaboration. In doing this, we use Google Docs and everyone who edited some of the papers made gmail accounts under their game persona. Anyways, to cut to the chase, I recently logged into Google Drive which everything was migrated to for a copy of one of the docs. on the right hand side of the page was everyone who collaborated on them and I didn't recognize any of the name. They also had pics associated with the names. It didn't take long to figure out that Google associated them with a live person and put the image from their profile on them. I was also able to look at the Gmail addresses associated with them to find not only the character Gmail address but their main identity on Gmail. I then followed that identity and put a couple clues together from discussions in game and was able to find out an alarming amount of information about them. In one case, I was even able to use Google maps and their street view thing to get a street address on one of them from what she described, pics posted to her face book page, and posts on her friends pages.