Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?"
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.
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.
Facebook is an intel organization
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
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.
Yeah, I don't get it. Whenever I hear shit like this, I think "wait, why is this a problem?! Why are you using your REAL IDENTITY everywhere?!".
I mean, granted, I use my real first name -- but everyone knows I'm a fucktard within like two minutes of meeting me, so hiding my stupidity is sort of a lost cause.
Thoreau and Kaczynski tried it, but then they couldn't resist writing a manifesto.
You only need one leak between a consistent alias and your legal identity to connect all the dots though. The idea that you'll be forever vigilant and never goof up on an alias is a bit optimistic. Why is that approach any less prone to mistakes than being vigilant about your real name? You could rotate aliases instead, but that increases complexity, and complexity introduces its own increased odds of error. You could make the same argument about having a single alias too. I see having to guard at least one usernames as being unavoidable if you want to participate on discussion forums. I don't have any illusions that using a non-real name on its own provides me improved security though.
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.