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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."
How do I get rid of all those incriminating posts from all that time I wasted on /. while I was at work?
No.
I can't speak to getting rid of specific old traces of yourself, but you're definitely SOOL if you close the email account on which old forum/website accounts were based. Even removing data from spokeo.com and similar sites is based on access to email addresses that, again, were associated with old accounts.
I'm not happy when people dig into forums and start scrubbing bits out of them; it means that if I want to keep an accurate history of things I can look at, I need to save a copy, and if I'm having an internet argument with someone I need to stash a copy of everything they say on my website (or at least ready to go up there) to preserve coherency.
For people who I think might try to disappear, or for people who frequently delete or censor their blogposts/discussion posts, I already do this, but it's a pain in the butt. I don't want it to be more common.
It's healthier for society to accept that people change than to let everyone reenact 1984 every time they get nervous.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Whats the internet? They just listed some specific services. I'm on usenet going back to 1989, I believe. Certainly 1991 at worst. Anyone younger than 35 or so pretty much just said "usenet? whats that?"
Amusingly they didn't list what it takes to remove yourself from compuserve (I was on from 1981 till... donno) and prodigy and myspace and ...
30 years from now you'll mention you were on linkedin and the 22 year old girls in HR who filter the resumes will say, "huh? Whats a linkedin?" Ditto facebook, G+, etc.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I've never understood the fascination so many tech luddites and techies-who-think-they're-cool-by-hating-being-on-the-internet to try to erase their online presence. It'll only come back to bite you.
You don't have to share everything, but establishing your presence and "owning your name" gives you some measure of control in regards to what people find if they search for you. If you go the "you can't see me" route, anyone with a vendetta or anything (good or bad) that gets you in the news is suddenly all anyone searching sees. You can't control everything by being online, but you certainly have more control than if you try to hide.
It takes more than that. You also have to compartmentalize your real and assumed identities so your friends and acquaintances who do not value your privacy do not link them for you.
I find facebook's "is this really X's real name" queries to your social contacts especially dangerous.
You can erase your history completely if you change your name. Your new name (if well chosen) will have no Internet history associated with it.
I have a solution, but it involves simultaneous use of biological viruses and nukes. At a minimum, my solution will at least erase anyone's desire to care.
It takes more than that. You also have to compartmentalize your real and assumed identities so your friends and acquaintances who do not value your privacy do not link them for you. I find facebook's "is this really X's real name" queries to your social contacts especially dangerous.
Facebook is an intel organization's dream.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
And never buy a house or sign up for anything offline or do anything that ever goes into any form of public record. Basically, you need to go live in a cabin in the woods.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
While, in the US (or even the EU), we're not likely to see a "right to be forgotten", we might have a "right not to have one's identity exploited for advertising purposes". You should be able to quit an ad-supported service and insist that none of your data every appear on a page with an ad. If it does, the advertiser has to pay you a publicity fee. California has a law like that for photos - if you use someone's photo in an ad without their permission, you owe them at least $500 - much more if they're famous.
by using a handle (pseudonym) and never your real name.
It's a lot easier to connect the dots than you might think...
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
If 100% of everything anyone ever did and said were preserved for all of history, it would be the best thing that could happen for privacy.
Sure everyone could find any information they wanted, but that information would be less exploitable.
For example, a company you applied for a job to finds a picture of you getting wasted on New Years. Should they not hire you because you are a drunk? Well it turns out that they can also find drunk pictures of just about every applicant so you are no different.
Every single "bad" thing about you will either turn out to be something that is not really that bad in light of the fact that almost everyone does it, or actually bad (in which case you might need to go to jail).
Another example: Your girlfriend finds out you cheated on her using google. You are an asshole. It also turns out that 70% of the people she knows have cheated. It also turns out she cheated on you too. This sucks. Well yes, but was it worse than when we all successfully hid our cheating? At least now cheating doesn't seem as bad. In fact it may not even be considered cheating anymore since everyone knows about it immediately after it happens.
The real reason for wanting privacy is to not be able to be singled out. If everyone is able to be singled out, then nobody is able to be singled out. When a regular polygon gets infinite sides, it becomes a circle with 0 sides.
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.
How do I get rid of all those incriminating posts from all that time I wasted on /. while I was at work?
Log out and sign up with a different nick.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
As a fellow AC you should know better. The question is wrong. Keep the signal to noise ratio high and you will never have a need to regret your internet diving past.
Facebook is an intel organization
Where your life will be filmed by the myriad of critter cams out there.
no
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
by using a handle (pseudonym) and never your real name.
It's a lot easier to connect the dots than you might think...
Yep. Sometimes it's something as simple as an IP address, cookie, or Flash cookie that will do it. Or something more subtle, like unique web browser signatures (eg. the collection of fonts installed on your system is reported by some browsers and and can serve as a unique fingerprint.). And keep in mind, as far as I know there are no privacy laws that prevent an ISP from reporting the real name of a subscriber given their IP address, and many give that information out to police without warrants.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
"It's like peeing in a pool. Once it's in there, it's _in_ there." - some old 90s sitcom
Sneaky fuckers...
What do you think is the best method to get people to update old data? Require them to prove themselves in order to delete it, then simply ignore their request to delete it.
The moment you touch that old data, you've updated it with your current IP address. Once they have that, they can then connect the dots between new and old data, thus providing them with a much greater amount of information.
Yeah, maybe so, maybe no. Did you every "Like" something? How about a song somebody sent you the link to? How about a Youtube video of a song, say from "Glee"? And also, do you live in one of the states where it is LEGAL to fire your ass or kick you out of an apartment if you are gay or suspected of being gay? Fucked now, hey. Just because you said silly things to your friends.
Anything and everything can come back to haunt you. And occasionally someone does give a shit.
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
That doesn't work... at all... they don't care what your real name is. All they care about is being able to uniquely identify you, and target you with adds. Your full name is a horrible data point for that because there are probably dozens, if not thousands of other people with your same name. I have a rather unique name IRL and there are still at least 20 people I've found with the identical first and last.
Instead they track you based on dozens of data points combined. Any of which can not match, but if they have enough data points they can still be sure it's you based on the rest of the data points that match.
So lets say they have the following info on you:
Email address
IP address
Operating system
Browser
Fonts installed
Start page (where you launched their site from)
This is a rather simple list. Most marketing software tracks much more than this.
So they track when you login. In general, most of the above information is given over by default by your browser, besides the email address. The email address is the holy grail of data points because, even if you give them a bullshit email address (like you make up one on hotmail just for spam) you tend to use that same account on all sites. So every time you login they log all this data on you. Then their software collates all this data into: 100% of the time you logged in with all of the above data being the same with the exception of IP address. That seems to change between 2 IPs daily. Then, once a moth both those IPs change at random. A quick query shows that the first IP belongs to AT&T, and is clearly your home IP address. The second IP belongs to a company, and you access it between 8 and 3pm... so now they know where you work, and the hours you work.
Generally they don't need all of this, as long as they have a verified email address. BUT... then you come to the point where you switch emails. Or you have multiple accounts to thwart your tracking efforts. BUT, they have all of these other data points. They can still confirm it's you to an error fact higher than the number of people in the united states. That's good enough for them, and they link the data between the 2 accounts and add your new email address to your list of email addresses in their database.
But you say "AH WAIT! I didn't give my new email address to that site... I went over to this other one! They can't track me!" That's great, but it doesn't work. As things go now, the site you're at purchased a marketing package from a cloud service company. A company that tracks all of this data across thousands of sites. The marketing service likely even has peering agreements with other services.
Long story short? No matter what you do... how you protect yourself... you can not evade this tracking. You could use TOR but that would just be another data point for them. The very fact that your IP changes every time you log in is identifying. You may think that none of this matters, they don't have any of your real life data. But the fact is, they don't care about that. They just want to sell you stuff... whomever you are. Oh, and by the way, the second you buy anything online, they have all that real life data in spades.
Thoreau and Kaczynski tried it, but then they couldn't resist writing a manifesto.
You seem to be saying that living in the US is the problem.
Assuming this is something that happened to you, surely if that is the law and the general sentiment around where you are, you should be more prudent about not making it obvious? A bit like, how one can heartily enjoy the occasional spliff, but one wouldn't go blabbering about it to everyone in the world (which is essentially what doing anything with facebook actually is)
Also, move to somewhere less fucked in the head. Just saying...
you don't seem to understand. Some of that marketing companies biggest customers are probably your ISP, your bank, your school, your employer. You can not escape this. You cannot be anonymous on the internet and still use the internet in any meaningful way. Could you use TOR and never do anything but IRC chat and remain mostly anon? Probably. But what's the point then?
Or getting married, having children, owning or renting a house or any other thing society requires for living in its world.
ftfy
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
If you load up a virtual machine then there are no unique cookies, fonts, or anything on it uniquely you.
Doesn't gmail log every IP you logged in from?
GMail can read your mail; that is a bigger hole than the IP address of a coffee shop.
Google, however, usually does not have a need to try and discover your real life identity. It is not automatically published for everyone to see. That is what is important. If a corporation sells your browser fingerprint, use a different browser. This one, FF with AdBlock + NoScript + Ghostery + whatever else, shows no ads, blocks web bugs, and runs no scripts. It may still be tracked by IP addresses and other unique information, but why advertisers would be building a list of people who refuse their product? What would they do to me, send the mafia in? I'm not their client, and they move on. I don't need to outrun the bear, I only need to outrun the average Internet user.
One does not simply delete something from the Internet
you need just one VM, which has a fingerprint, which is shared with many other VM users. think of the tails live-system for example. I think it has a fingerprint, which is unique to one version of tails, and shared between many users of this version.