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Is It Possible To Erase Yourself From the Internet?

Posted by samzenpus on from the back-in-the-shadows dept.

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."

13 of 295 comments (clear)

  1. What about slashdot? by dnahelicase · · Score: 5, Funny

    How do I get rid of all those incriminating posts from all that time I wasted on /. while I was at work?

  2. Step 1 - NEVER close an old email account by gubon13 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Whats the internet? by vlm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  4. Don't do it! by The+Good+Reverend · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:This problem is easily solved by sinij · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. change your name by stenvar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:This problem is easily solved by Kenja · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?"
  8. FTFY by tacokill · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Facebook is an intel organization

    1. Re:FTFY by Gr8Apes · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Unfortunately, even if you are aware and intelligent, that doesn't stop the stupid from tagging your happy anonymous butt in that picture they took 10 years ago of you with their sister... and blammo, now you are "in the system" and identified, your correlation factor may be low, but something will come up when you're queried and if it's the only thing....

      The only way to "erase" yourself is not to remove all bits of you, but to poison the well. Create many false accounts and post lots of irrelevant things, some about you with bad data if you're already all over the net. The higher the noise level you create with the more false data, the less valuable the "true" data is since data mining becomes less and less certain. Another fun thing - make some accounts with variations of your name, close but not exact, then post the passwords in forums and let random people take them where you want. Remember, you're not interested in reputation - you're interested in bad data.

      Your last option would be to have been born a John Smith or Kim Davis - I've known a few of both. Locating specific people with those names is rather difficult.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
  9. Re:This problem is easily solved by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  10. Re:It's the New You by Seumas · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  11. Re:This problem is easily solved by WinstonWolfIT · · Score: 5, Funny

    Thoreau and Kaczynski tried it, but then they couldn't resist writing a manifesto.

  12. Re:It's the New You by greg1104 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.