
Ask HN: What Are the Best Current Methods to Delete Yourself from the Internet? - christianbryant
For those of us interested in dropping off the grid, what are the best current methods of removal of information from search engines and servers that host information about you, whether known by you or not?  How could these methods be improved upon to increase the coverage of erasure?  And what do you think the future of personal identify cleanup will look like, or will it even be possible after a certain point?
======
eterm
Don't try to change the internet, just change everything else.

Move country, change your name, change the industry in which you work and
change the hobbies in which you are interested. Change the clothes you wear
and your style of haircut.

All of that is a lot easier than trying to track down all lose-ends over the
internet. You won't escape state-level actors if that is your concern but
you'll have some distance between your offline and online history.

~~~
jasonkostempski
You won't even have to go further than this site to run into obstacles, you
can't delete your HN account, I've tried. And, like me, OP seems to have used
their real name.

~~~
gaius
Yeah, this is an issue for those of us who came online in a different era of
the Internet. Nowadays people can and should assume that the Internet is
actively hostile and malicious before they even log in for the very first
time. We grew up in a far more innocent age. Loads of us used our real names
on Usenet for example because it simply never occurred to us that someone was
archiving it all, after all, why would anyone even want to do such a thing?
And who had the money for it? And they didn't tell anyone they were doing it
until years after they started, which was in very poor taste.

~~~
ghaff
Even way back when, archives of Usenet postings were a thing. (Although it
wasn't really systematically or completely archived.) Perhaps many people
didn't fully appreciate how things they wrote under their True Names could be
out there "forever." Or they assumed that Usenet was pretty much an exclusive
club and things they wrote wouldn't be visible to the general public. But I'm
not sure why someone posting on Usenet would assume that whatever they wrote
was ephemeral and wouldn't be seen by anyone else a few years hence.

~~~
gaius
I don't think anyone anticipated the shift in online culture from "what goes
online stays online" to the present day when people are actively scouring
forums, mailing lists, archives etc for something to weaponize and brigade in
the "real world".

------
tyingq
If the purpose is to make it hard for a 3rd party to use internet searches to
find out information about you, there's an easier way.

Instead of the impossible task of making web pages with your name go away,
instead, flood the internet with fake information tied to your name and
identity. Create profiles with your real name, but everything else faked on
popular sites. They'll have a better chance of crowding out pages you want to
push down in search results if you make them actually valuable, versus just
junk profiles. For example, a fake github identity, but with some actual
useful project hosted there carries more weight. Or a profile (your name,
faked job, faked photo) on LinkedIn that's tied to actual, insightful posts.

Not easy to do in a way that's there's enough volume to crowd out whatever
you're trying to hide. But, it's certainly easier than trying to convince
third parties to take down existing web pages.

~~~
whatshisface
The interested party could just look at the timestamps and ignore everything
posted after the date when contradictory information began to appear.

~~~
nostrademons
The interesting stuff is what happened after the date when contradictory
information began to appear.

Most people's identity gradually changes over time. The usefulness of knowing
what they've done comes entirely from being able to predict what they _will
do_ in the future. If all you've got is stuff > ~5 years old, it's virtually
useless. Occasionally, if you're running for public office, some newspaper
will dig up dirt of something inappropriate you did in college, but all you
have to do is say "I'm horrified and ashamed that such embarrassing old
stories have been dug up now, and they in no way reflect my beliefs or actions
today" and most of the public will give you a pass. Most of them did pretty
horrifying and shameful stuff when they were in college too.

This also suggests a general way to erase yourself from the Internet: just
stop posting. Eventually, all of your old posts - if they don't get deleted by
sites going out of business - will simply cease to be relevant, and becomes
active misdirection for people trying to predict your actions now.

~~~
danso
> _This also suggests a general way to erase yourself from the Internet: just
> stop posting. Eventually, all of your old posts - if they don 't get deleted
> by sites going out of business - will simply cease to be relevant, and
> becomes active misdirection for people trying to predict your actions now._

It is most definitely not that simple. You're giving people too much credit in
thinking that they can let go of the past, rather than making snap judgments
from first impressions. You really think an employer is _not_ going to be
negatively impacted by seeing an off-color racist joke in an old blog post you
made in college? Especially if that blog post is the second thing that comes
up in Google results after your LinkedIn page because you don't have anything
else attached to your name?

No one cares about predicting your future if they have no interest in
associating with you in the present.

~~~
nostrademons
Just ignore the people who don't want to associate with you, and focus your
energy on the people who do. It's usually a good idea anyway: people might not
like you for one of a zillion different reasons, and you probably will never
know which one it is, and it doesn't really matter anyway since you're not
likely to change that assessment once made.

It's good to _stop making those racist jokes_ because it'll bias the folks who
want to hang out with you towards those folks who a lot of other folks don't
want to hang out with, but most people judge based on the present reality, and
the ones who don't usually aren't folks that you'd want around you now anyway.

------
anondon
The problem is that the user has no control over his data, so you are at the
mercy of the service provider.

Surprisingly, a _lot_ of websites/services don't even give you the option to
delete your account.

Best method to delete yourself from the internet:

* make a list of all services you are on

* if a service lets you delete your account, delete it

* if there is no delete option, email customer support and ask them to delete your account. Most sites will not create a fuss about it though it takes time and lots of back and forth with the customer support

* search for yourself on google and ask google to remove links to your profiles(social media). They won't remove links to eg- articles about you, since it does not belong to you

Depending on how generous you were with your personal info, it is most likely
not possible to delete yourself completely.

Funny story: I had a LinkedIn account where I signed up with only my email ID
and gave no personally identifiable info(like a fake account). A few days
later I get an SMS from LinkedIn telling me person XYZ sent me a request or
something. How the f_uck did you get my number? To say the least, that scared
me so I deleted the account.

Also note that when a service _deletes_ your account and data, it is more
often a soft delete so your data is still with them. Good luck getting a hard
deletion of your account/data.

~~~
rawnlq
For example you can't even delete your comments/account on hacker news

~~~
tokenizerrr
Luckily not. I've seen what happens on Reddit when people do that, and it's
awful.

Come back to an old thread and it's full of [deleted] and "This comment has
been deleted by a script blablabla by the way fuck you"

~~~
kctess5
Is that so bad? Granted maybe it's annoying looking at old threads, but as a
user, the ability to go through and remove old and potentially regrettable
posts is quite welcome.

Maybe a good compromise would be to remove the user information after a
certain time period (~2 years). Hashing the username salted with the post
title would be a decent way of systematically respecting user privacy while
also keeping old threads readable. I wouldn't mind if HN did this.

~~~
ryandrake
You'd be surprised how much you could piece together with obfuscated (but
still unique) usernames. I'd be in favor of your system if the hash was salted
with the article's id, so that the hash of my username in one article was
different than the hash of my username in a different article.

One day I'm going to run for office and I'm going to have to get lawyers to
scrub HN of all my comments because they have no way for users to manage their
content :-)

~~~
krapp
Really, usernames only have to be unique within a single thread, don't they?

You could get away with something as simple as incremental ids in that case -
user1, user2, etc.

~~~
kctess5
Yeah that was my reasoning. The salted hash would be an easy way to implement
single-thread username consistency.

Edit: for better readability it could be further mapped into a table of human
readable handles, similar to how Google does the "Anonymous Lemur" thing in
gDocs.

------
manumit
The only way to win is to never have played.

At this point, forget about data privacy. If the data is out there, it's out
there and you're never going to change that. The best you can hope for is for
the actual practical consequences to be mitigated by effective legal
constraints on what people can do to you based on your data.

In the US, there are a few examples of this kind of protection - the Genetic
Information Non-discrimination Act prohibits genetic information being used to
deny/price health insurance coverage, or to discriminate in employment. The
Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) prohibits denial of health insurance
coverage for (or due to) pre-existing conditions. (Note that life insurance in
the US is not covered by these laws, so people who may ever need life
insurance coverage would be ill-served by ANY kind of genetic testing for any
reason - the information can only hurt you. And god help you if you have a bad
credit rating; in most places you won't be able to get a decent job or
housing.)

Many European countries have better protections against discrimination in
housing, employment, and insurance coverage on the basis of personal data (in
addition to granting individual rights over that data held by third parties.)
As an American who suffered identity theft in the US and suffered all kinds of
hassles for years as a result, the single thing that ameliorated them best was
leaving the USA and moving to an EU member state.

------
k-mcgrady
Recently I decided to try to 'remove myself from the internet'. I just wanted
to be a bit more private personally. The best way I could come up with was to
Google myself, go through the first 2-3 pages and work on removing that data.
So I had to get some stuff removed from Crunchbase (had to email them for
this), delete my Twitter, tell Facebook not to let search engines index me
(same for LinkedIn). I also changed from using my real name to using a handle
on some services (e.g. GitHub). It too some time but recently I had a new
friend tell me they were trying to find me online and couldn't so it was quite
a successful approach.

~~~
dorianm
Nice! Yes that's quite a good method. I also found that googling my name +
some relevant keywords (like ruby, programming, resume, etc. in my case) found
relevant results

~~~
ryandrake
Fortunately my name is fairly common, and a google search for it alone shows
no links related to me, well past page 10 or so of results, so horay for good
opsec. Use the right keywords though and you can still find me. A good newbie
approach is to start by not using any of the popular social media stuff
(Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) and if you do, make sure it has no
information about you or fake information.

EDIT: Of course I acknowledge a determined attacker could obtain all sorts of
info about me. Not bragging or inviting doxxing, kthx.

------
confounded
\- Google and Facebook currently allow you to delete your data, and both say
that they really mean it. I doubt that this policy will be around in a few
years, so it's worth taking advantage of now. Even if you want to still use
these services, it's worth 're-incarnating' yourself without decades of data
and phone numbers, email addresses, etc. tied to a name. This is easy for
Google, but very difficult for Facebook; it's explicitly against their TOS,
and algorithmically enforced. If you've got spare cash, it's easiest to buy a
$40 dollar burner phone and do it over 4G; spare your IP address, and the
sign-up flow is slick (paid for UA channel).

\- The email address, phone number, credit card number, and the SSN are still
the canonical forms of identity in the data industry. You can almost always
transact without an SSN, and the rest can be re-generated so that they don't
follow you around, with some money and effort. For example, buy a burner
domain, and use a different email address for each service (e.g.
joespizza@user_id.lol).

Abine Inc. (I'm a customer, no other affiliation) offer a service which:

* Generates burner emails, and forwards mail to you

* Gives you a virtual phone number which forwards calls and texts (but which you can ditch/rotate)

* Virtual credit cards, no real name needed

I rolled my own solution for the email thing, but the cards and telephone
numbers work great. Making-up outlandish names to buy cinema-tickets and
burritos with is still entertaining my wife and I after a whole year!

They also have a service called 'DeleteMe' which I think is basically paying
an intern to click-through all the opt-out forms of the data brokerages on
your behalf.

~~~
syrrim
If google and facebook - who make their money off data - are willing to delete
data for free, then they probably have some legal mandate to do so. If so,
then they will continue to allow deletion while the laws remain in place.

~~~
exolymph
What makes you think that they have a legal mandate, when so many other
websites and services don't offer the option?

------
idlewords
The answer depends a lot on location... where do you live, and what's your
full name?

~~~
Someone
The profile page for user _christianbryant_ links to a page on darkreading.com
that claims the name for that user is Christian Bryant, so, if the name isn't
Christian Bryant, he (or maybe 'she'?) shows another way to 'delete'
information about oneself from the internet: bury it in misinformation.

That's a lot of work and won't erase everything, but it can help.

~~~
softawre
Swoosh

------
petilon
In the United States, if you register to vote your name, age, address, and the
names of people who live at the same address all end up on
[https://voterrecords.com](https://voterrecords.com) and they don't let you
remove it. If you are 40+ this may subject you to age discrimination--you may
not even make it to the interview stage. I am now looking into how I can
unregister to vote.

If you fill in an application to rent an apartment, or purchase property, your
information ends up on the internet.

Our laws need to be updated for the internet age. There is public interest in
knowing who owns the property at a certain address, but the reverse lookup of
the same information--where does a certain citizen live--should be made
illegal without the permission of the citizen.

~~~
ghaff
That site appears to only cover some states.

I'm not sure how your proposal would work in any case. If a database record
with your name in it exists (because you bought a house, have a telephone
number, got married, got arrested, etc.) looking up any permutation of that
data is just a search. I don't know how you make that illegal.

It's true that some laws/decisions about what constitutes public data arguably
made more sense when finding that data required making the effort to
physically look through the physical files of some town clerk who was probably
out for lunch. However, this has been a topic of discussion since companies
started selling databases on CD-ROMs and nothing much has changed. So I'm
inclined to think that genie is well out of that particular bottle.

~~~
petilon
It shouldn't be "just a search". In other words, it should be possible to go
to a web site, enter an address and find out who owns the property at that
address. But the same site should not allow the user to enter the name of a
citizen and get the address where that citizen lives, or who else lives at the
same address. So businesses who possess the data should not be allowed to just
dump the entire data into Google's search indexes, they can only allow certain
narrow searches.

~~~
ghaff
So, again, you're basically proposing that even though data is legitimately in
the public domain, somehow people should be prevented from connecting that
data with a search. Good luck with that.

~~~
krishanath
The government should not put citizen's personal information in the "public
domain". When government collects personal information about its citizens
there should be laws governing what is allowed use and what isn't.

~~~
greglindahl
The list of people who voted in a particular election is placed into the
public domain as an anti-fraud measure. It's an important part of the US
version of democracy. Other info like property ownership is public for similar
reasons. Rich people form trusts to buy property and obscure their names.

------
Tempest1981
In 4th grade, they started teaching kids about their "digital tattoo". A
reasonable analogy -- like a tattoo, it's very hard to erase whatever you put
out there.

Non-profit: [http://www.mydigitaltat2.org](http://www.mydigitaltat2.org)

~~~
thatwebdude
Props 4 da super cool naming.

------
maccard
For those of us who aren't looking to totally drop off the grid, but are
concerned about their online footprint and privacy online; check out
[https://www.privacytools.io](https://www.privacytools.io) (not affiliated).
It's a good starting point for choosing trusted third party services. I'd be
interested in other responses or advice for people who try and do the same.

~~~
thatwebdude
Nice resource, I like the endorsement by GG. Will definitely be checking it
out...

------
id122015
First, delete all the content you published and social network accounts like I
did. Change the name first of those accounts to be sure that if they wont
totally delete your account, it will not be your name in the system. In the
case of some websites you may be able to convince the owners to delete the
content you posted. Some other websites, might not be easily convinced, but
you can bait them with money to achieve your goal.

I did all that. Currently the only place my full name shows on the internet in
on Companies House, because they keep those records, for almost 20 years after
you close a company. And those same records get published by third parties
also. Other than that, I'm GHOSTING.

~~~
thatwebdude
Are we sure social networks aren't versioning almost every piece of metadata
about you? After all, storage is cheap.

------
elastic_church
First, change your names on social media accounts and then delete the account.

Second, use the right to be forgotten laws in Europe (even if you aren't
European). They've got Google by the balls and at the very least you'll be
scrubbed from google pages in Europe, perhaps very soon - or not - you'll be
scrubbed from Google worldwide.

Third, might want to change your phone number. But at the very least, even if
you have poor impulse control or are too attached to do the first step, just
remove your phone numbers from your social media accounts. Uninstall those
apps from your phone. Clear your cookies. The main goal is to disassociate
your phone number from social. You inadvertently upload it in a variety of
ways, and this is a key component to their graphs. Changing it is better
because your friends upload your number anyway. Now you will have a new number
and no social media profile linked to it.

Fourth, be conscious of what/where you post. Now that you won't have privacy
anxiety, this will be much easier to pay attention to.

Fifth, at your leisure, send sternly worded 'remove this content' emails to
any web pages that still reveal info about you. Don't do this from free email
and gmail accounts, do it from more authoritative sounding domain names. But
in the email, refer to yourself as "my client"

~~~
DanBC
> Second, use the right to be forgotten laws in Europe (even if you aren't
> European). They've got Google by the balls and at the very least you'll be
> scrubbed from google pages in Europe, perhaps very soon - or not - you'll be
> scrubbed from Google worldwide.

This isn't quite accurate.

The search results are only removed for browsers within Europe.

Google will only removed "outdated" or "irrelevant" search results.

Google approve less than half the requests it gets for RtbF.

------
the-dude
You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave ...

~~~
thatwebdude
"You can deactivate any time you like, but you can never delete!..." (Guitar
solo...)

------
amelius
Best is to first replace all your information on those services by fake
information. Then create a bunch of accounts with the same name, and also
enter fake information. Then delete all the stuff.

Remember: you can decrease the signal-to-noise ratio by decreasing the signal,
or by increasing the noise.

------
ZitchDog
I don't think there's any way. There are too many identity aggregators. I
think the only way would be to create lots of fake profiles and fake
information tied to your name, thereby drowning out the signal.

------
cm2187
Give all service providers a unique email, and a fake name. It will be very
hard to correlate your identity between two providers. And most providers
don't need your real name.

------
darkhorn
[http://backgroundchecks.org/justdeleteme/](http://backgroundchecks.org/justdeleteme/)

------
christianbryant
The question stems from a hypothetical problem. A person who works undercover,
let's say, and has a fairly unique name, is concerned that their real name, if
ever revealed, could be searched and then the associations to family and
friends revealed from this search be used to either coerce the undercover
person to work against the law, or simply to hurt the associated family and
friends in retaliation for duty performed. The agency for which the undercover
person works does not aid in any way the cleaning up of public data available
against the person's true identity.

------
iamthepieman
Off the grid is a good phrase. Have you ever tried living off the electrical
grid? You either spend a ton of money building your own "grid" so your life
doesn't have to change or your life becomes radically different from everyone
else you used to know including yourself.

------
invaliduser
"John Smith"

I personally found that having a very very common name provides a lot of
privacy. If you look me up by my real firstname/lastname, you'll find out we
are borg, we are 1000s, and I'm burried somewhere far and deep in the search
results.

~~~
ghaff
For better or worse, having a very common name is one of the best ways to
hide. By contrast, my name is effectively unique (at least among people who
have any web presence).

The worst of both world though is probably having an almost unique name that
you share with someone notorious who could plausibly be you for reasons of
age, location, etc. I once knew someone who shared names (in the pre-Web era)
with someone who was a widely hated figure at one point in NYC. My
acquaintance literally got death threats on his answering machine aimed at
this individual.

------
phkahler
Distributed social media where all your posts are on your own private
server/NAS box next to your router. This means only people you "connect with"
will have access. No companies will collect data. At the time of your choosing
you can just delete your info. This doesn't prevent your friends from making
copies, but they usually won't. As for sites like HN, use an alias so the
posts can't be connected back to the real you. That's hard to put leakage, so
let's try to create such sites so that when an account is deleted it really
is. Not sure how to ensure that.

~~~
rhizome
You just described a major feature of the imaginary federated social network
I've been designing in my head for the past several years: you have a "profile
information provider" (your phone, a third-party website) that you subscribe
into your various social networks, SNs then existing only to provide a social
graph within their context. Your personal info then remains under your control
(as the idea goes) with access granted and revoked at will.

------
ramtatatam
There are companies that can help you removing your `digital shadow` -
[https://www.digitalshadows.com/the-digital-
shadow/](https://www.digitalshadows.com/the-digital-shadow/)

disclaimer - I happen to know digital shadow from event I once attended. I'm
not associated with them and for that matter I had not used their product,
however I find the idea pretty interesting and kinda cool :-)

------
WhiteSource1
Impossible to completely delete yourself - especially with things like the
Internet Archive, so even if you delete current pages, there'll be an archive.

Best thing is delete all your accounts, request any mentions of you to be
removed, and as others said change your name so that things like Zoominfo and
bots don't pick up on you.

------
Tempest1981
If you _do_ change your name/identity/city, do you also switch careers?

How do you approach applying for jobs? Do you make a fake resume/CV? Or just a
new empty one focused more on "skills" vs job history?

And what do you say when they ask about job experience? Honesty, I guess, but
it might make them curious/suspicious/nosey.

------
koksik202
I had sent emails to websites I held accounts for but I forgot logins to e.g.
myspace to delete my content and they did :) I was not happy with pictures I
posted years ago just before my interview after finishing college. I have
active social network accounts I m not paranoid about the information there

------
LeicaLatte
Do you have a phone number? Ever received a package? Do you pay taxes? Then
you are already on the internet.

------
known
Repairing Online Reputation?
[https://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/02/17/1824232/repairing--
e...](https://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/02/17/1824232/repairing--establishing-
online-reputation)

------
peterwwillis
I'm pretty sure that claiming you want to drop off the grid just makes them
want to track you more.

------
givinguflac
If I want to remove something, I edit as much of it as possible to be
underscores and/or fake/nonsense, then delete the comment/account. So unless
the service keeps various versions of the same comment (some may, many don't)
that info is effectively gone.

------
gspetr
\- Facebook account is like herpes, it stays with you for life.

\- No, Facebook is worse.

\- How?

\- Herpes goes away when you die.

------
home_boi
Is there anyway to delete/DMCA those white page websites (whitepages.com,
spokeo, instantcheckmate, etc.) that list all your relatives and your past
physical addresses?

~~~
exolymph
No, because none of that information is protected by copyright. You could try
contacting their CS.

------
antidaily
Sounds like a great SaaS product. Get to work, guys.

~~~
greglindahl
There are already several SaaS products in this space. They do things like:
(1) giving you instructions for deleting yourself on sites that allow it, (2)
flood the Internet with fake content about your name, (3) file (potentially
bogus) DMCA notices/RTBF requests for stuff that wasn't buried by (1) and (2).

It's called "reputation management" by some.

As an example of (3), sites like Ripoff Report won't remove info, but, if you
can get a copyright logo or photo onto a Ripoff Report page, you can DMCA
google & have the entire page unindexed.

------
closeparen
You need to find a job that will hire you without I-9 verification, pay cash,
and not withhold taxes or report your employment to the IRS. You need to
sublet for cash (without the landlord's knowledge, so he doesn't generate any
records like a lease) and not have your name on the apartment or any utility
accounts.

The banking system is loaded with KYC rules; you will need to steer clear of
it. Do not get an ID at all unless the photo no longer resembles you and the
address listed on it checked out at the time but is no longer considered a
threat (remember that your old neighbors might sit with a sketch artist or
remember a comment in passing about where you might be headed next). Obviously
no car registration or driving. Switch transit fare cards frequently; be
careful of the CCTV cameras on the farecard vending machines.

Use distinct prepaid device for each call. Make your way to a pseudorandom
location (the locations of all your calls plotted on a map should not let
anyone infer the general vicinity of your home, workplace, or where you might
surface next). Make the call over a unique Signal account, be brief, and
securely destroy the phone.

Obviously no flying, and especially no crossing international borders. You
most certainly cannot do anything predictable like show up at your parents'
house at Christmas.

If you must use email, use Tails, use a different email address and PGP key
for every message, come up on secondhand laptops over Tor on public wifi at
places that can't individually identify laptop users mechanically, and places
too busy to remember the faces of specific laptop users.

Obviously, social media of any form, any sort of communication (even letter-
writing) with people who won't apply this tradecraft as carefully as you every
single time with no exceptions ever, legitimate employment, anything licensed,
and anything related to the banking system are totally out of the question.

... by now it should be clear that "dropping off the grid" is almost certainly
not what you want to do, and that 95% of what you have to fear from "the grid"
has been here long before social media and doesn't care that you deleted your
Facebook account, because it is integral to every part of life.

The relation name ~ face ~ residence ~ phone ~ email ~ occupation ~ employer ~
financials is _probably_ not something you _actually_ want to "erase" or keep
secret, unless you are willing to go to extreme lengths. And at that point,
the government's "someone is using tradecraft" senses will likely go off, and
they'll likely come at you with some old fashioned human intelligence work
that your Hacker News sensibilities won't protect you against.

You might want to think more deliberately about which pieces of information
you're trying to _disassociate_ from that relation, because that's a much more
tenable project.

------
jcoffland
Fake your own Internet death.

------
iamthepieman
You have to consider who you are trying to hide from. Hiding something in the
face of an active pursuer is an act of aggression or at least, counter-
aggression. In warfare there is the concept of enemy combatant. An ethical
force will adhere to the idea that they only actively pursue and disable
combatants not merely resistors, demonstrators or those taking countermeasures
to protect themselves.

Some people may be combatants by things other than actions of violence.
Wearing an enemy uniform even if you are not holding a rifle or actively
participating in a battle, spying, providing serious material aid to the
combatants etc.

I think these are apt comparisons to privacy and personal information because
having them is a sort of ephemeral habeas corpus (I'm aware of the
contradiction). You 'have the person' (that's what habeas corpus literally
means) in a digital/information sense. Of course there's no exclusivity as
there is with an actual bodily person.

Warfare is ultimately about controlling the bodies - you kill the bodies and
then you win. If more of your bodies are standing or if more of their bodies
can be convinced to stop fighting or to come over to your side or just lose
the will to fight then you win (trying to encompass more than just battlefield
warfare here which is quickly becoming less important)

So this very long winded setup is just to say that the "future of personal
identity cleanup" is an oxymoron or at least a contradiction. "Hiding" whether
digitally or otherwise is an ACTIVE thing. I guess the cleaning concept is
useful to a degree. If I clean my kitchen then it stays clean...until I make
dinner the next night - which, because I need to eat, I will inevitably do.
And then it's just as messy and requires just as much effort as it did
previously to clean.

So unless you are dead, you can't just clean up your digital trail and be
done. This is assuming that you want to go about living a relatively normal
life and not smuggle yourself to an uninhabited island.

So the future of digital privacy will be a series of compromises and trade
offs. I don't want to be at all disrespectful about the situation in Syria
because it is grief ridden disaster but I think this illustration is a good
one.

There are still people in Syria. You may think to yourself, "Why are people
still in Syria? People with families". Because some people can't leave, some
people don't think it's that bad for any number of reasons such as blind luck,
blind faith or any other form of blindness. Regardless they are still there.

And that's how digital privacy is. Most people won't care which means there
won't be a demand which means you will stand out when you do demand (to be not
seen)

This is too long.

TLDR:

1: TOOLS - tools to help you just like new kitchen gadgets. Some will be fads,
some will be workhorses like the classic kitchenaid mixer and others will be
just for pros or people with a passion for it.

2\. KNOWLEDGE - Knowing how to hide what you really want to hide. This is
going to be helped more and more by tech. People who don't want to hide
anything won't ever know about these but those who do will. Starts with VPNS,
separate accounts, never bringing a device with an EMF signal to certain
places, how to use strong encryption etc. but includes basic digital
tradecraft.

3: COMPROMISE - Don't ever use social media. Or do and realize that part of
your life is never going to get a privacy cleanup. It's the fryolator of your
digital life. Makes things delicious, unhealthy and never clean. Other
compromises and realizing that just like credit, it's hard to repair mistakes
in digital privacy.

The question is so simple. . . . I wish the answer was. Sorry this is so
rambling. I was going to include a why you should listen to me section but
then I'd have to tell you who I am.

------
welanes
Time machine. Probably.

------
baccheion
Don't put it on the internet to begin with.

------
z3t4
change your name, email adress and phone nr.

------
dbg31415
I have a fairly unique name. Anyway 5 years ago I was on a date, met the girl
online. She started asking me about places I had lived... and she just knew
way too much about me. She confessed she had paid like $20 to look me up on
one of those extended search services before the date. There was no second
date. Totally creeped me out... but I did get the name of the service she
used, and when I got home I ran a search on myself to see what all was there.

What's worse than all the information being out there, or parallel I guess, is
that the shitty service had a bunch of information wrong. It said I lived in a
state where I co-signed a lease for my sister (and since I have the same last
name as my sister the service drew the conclusion we were married), it said
that I still owned a home in yet another state (I had sold it years before)...
It also returned my year-by-year income (most of which was fairly accurate),
court records (even from when I was a little kid showing up at my parents'
divorce hearing), and the exact amount I still owed on my house. No clue how
they got all that shit.

Around that time I went looking for ways to purge it all, I stumbled across
this post:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/j1mit/how_to_re...](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/j1mit/how_to_remove_yourself_from_all_background_check/)

I filled out every opt-out form I could find.

Here we are, 5 years later... I can say... a few less scammy sites show up
when you search for me... but on the whole not really much impact. A bunch of
information these sites have is still wrong, and a lot of the sites... even if
you go through all the trouble of opting out... they only honor the opt-out
for a year.

I asked my lawyer if there was a way, how do celebrities and such keep their
records out of these people's hands... and his response was, "You probably
have to contact each site and pay then to take you off..." At which point I
decided to cheer if anyone ever fire-bombed the offices of Radaris or Spokeo
or Yatedo or any of the other shit-information sites.

We need laws that make it legal for us to all kick the CEO of these companies
in the nuts -- one good solid kick each. Freedom of information, all that...
necessary for democracy... and it's just a short hop from there over to
aggregation services... but we should at least ensure that people who want to
profit off eroding privacy shouldn't be able to reproduce.

Seems like there was an update to that post.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/31u84n/how_to_r...](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/31u84n/how_to_remove_yourself_from_most_background_check/)

~~~
contingencies
_...fire-bombed the offices of..._

To be clear, just in case anyone reading does not understand, this would have
no impact as data is now routinely stored at multiple, geographically
disparate data centers run by disparate companies within completely distinct
legal jurisdictions, as contracted by distinct legal entities, and these are
increasingly all kept secret via services like Cloudflare, corporate service
agents, DNS privacy services, international accountants and lawyers.

So... don't go getting firebombing ideas. Instead, take your pyro inklings out
through the retro game _Pyro ][_ in which our protagonist begins by burning
down the IRS -
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pyro+2+abandonware](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pyro+2+abandonware)

~~~
krapp
A large scale, sustained global atmospheric thermonuclear barrage might do the
trick - generate a wave of electromagnetic pulses and fry all the electronics
on the planet.

~~~
contingencies
You'd need some serious power to get the subterranean ones and the shielded
ones.

~~~
krapp
If you take out enough of the internet's infrastructure, the rest of it
becomes pretty useless.

You'd have to take out the satellites too, though - I forgot about that. All
the satellites.

------
slvrspoon
we've run this service for a number of years and processed probably a million
or so opt-outs successfully. nothing "deletes you from the web" obviously, but
happy to answer any questions from anyone:
[https://www.abine.com/deleteme/landing.php](https://www.abine.com/deleteme/landing.php)

