May 04, 2021
5088
0How to Disappear From the Internet
Perhaps it’s time to “be zeroed out” and start all over again. Or maybe this modern online life, in which any stranger can learn a lot about us if they want to, is not quite suitable for some people? Or perhaps you want to escape from a few unworthy individuals.
Remember your personal internet protection, and follow these tips to prevent any cyber threats.
For whatever reason, you decide to burn down your old life, cut off all connections, and remove your presence from the internet.
Your path will be difficult, but not impossible.
How to disappear from the internet? We have prepared an set of actions to help you disappear from the internet forever.
You can read about two sides of the internet and how to get access to them here.
The reasons to disappear from the internet
The internet is a global phenomenon, but individual countries regulate it in different ways. Territorial characteristics affect how information is processed and who can influence it. This is one difficulty out of many. Another is people’s desire to leave as big a mark as possible on the World Wide Web. Although this is not always a conscious desire — sometimes they “follow” out of ignorance.
Newcomers, going to the internet, register far and wide, and the ones who have been online for a long time have probably already forgotten all the places they’ve left data about themselves.
Today, there is more and more talk about the need to protect personal data. Find out more about data protection methods here.
Data about you is collected by search engines, operating systems, programs and applications (in other words, everything you do online). This includes: your full name, phone numbers, bank cards, addresses, geo-location (where and how often you visit), information about your habits, friends, acquaintances, interests, purchases, and so on to infinity.
In some countries, there are firms that, for a fee, will scour the internet or only its national segment and remove from there everything that harms the reputation of the customer or simply “should not be there” (photos, videos, text data). The price depends on the degree of importance of the person and the amount of information distributed about them — and we are not talking about hundreds of dollars, but tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars.
To be honest, a person will not be able to delete their information from the internet completely, and something will definitely remain. But you can try your best by following the next tips.
Guide: how to disappear from the internet
Step #1. Delete all your social media accounts
The first and easiest step for someone who has decided to say goodbye to the internet is to delete their social networks accounts. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, these sites that will willingly give you the opportunity to destroy your personal page with a single click.
Problems with deleting an account can only occur for Facebook users. The service uses the deactivation function (temporary freeze), so before deleting the account, the user should make sure that the page was erased from the network, and not temporarily frozen.
You can use databases to find old and new accounts in social networks with Pipl.com.
The best way to stop online surveillance and tracking.
Step #2. Forget about forums
After you’ve dealt with your social media accounts, it’s time to remember the past. Search engines will help you cover all forums and blog platforms. For now, they are your friends in the difficult task of erasing your digital identity, but then we will deal with them.
The user who wants to leave the internet should enter their data (usernames, nicknames, first name, last name, addresses, phone numbers) in Google, Yahoo and find information about themselves. Here you will have to remember all your passwords to half-forgotten accounts.
Forget about Google forever! It knows everything about you.
If it doesn’t work out, contact the admins directly, but don’t forget — the law is not on your side. When contacting site managers, be polite and clearly state why you want the post to be deleted. Here everything will depend only on your communication skills.
It is another matter if we are talking not just about comments or anonymous posts, but about personal data. By law, personal information about you on third-party sites, services and resources must be deleted at your first request. This data includes the last name, first name, patronymic, date and place of birth, address of residence, information about family and social status, information about education and profession, and information about income.
You can read more about personal information nuances here.
Step #3. Say goodbye to shopping and services
The third step of the future invisible man is to remember all the sites of companies that you have ever registered on: numerous online services, dating sites, online stores. A normal person will not be able to remember all this, but there is an excellent service JustDelete.Me. This is a directory of direct links to the pages of deleting your own account on the sites of 300 services. There you can also see how easy or difficult it is to delete your site data for a particular company.
Don’t forget that on such pages as Tinder, Amazon, and eBay, your account is erased in a couple of clicks.
Step #4. Try Deseat.me
You can click on each link and manually deal with accounts, but there is also a faster way — a web application Deseat.me. This is an online service that was created in 2016 by two developers from Sweden. To use the app, you need to go to the site and log in with your Google account. After that, the service will independently start checking all the sites on which you have registered.
Once the scan is complete, the app gives you the option to delete your pages, freeze them, or change your password. There is one drawback — the service only works for users of the Gmail domain.
*Note: Some sites do not allow users to delete accounts or information about themselves. In this case, you can only modify the truthful data as much as possible, replace your name, address and contacts with fictitious ones.
Step #5. Don’t forget about data collection sites
For you, the internet is a place where you can read the news and laugh at memes. But for some people, it’s just a Klondike. Many companies make billions collecting your personal information, but there are only a few of the largest ones. These include the services of Spokeo, Whitepages, and PeopleFinder — the so-called “information brokers” of the World Wide Web that monitor the actions of users on the internet. At this stage, you will have to deal with them.
Basically, these organizations work for advertisers and share your data with marketing specialists. One way to disappear from the database is to contact the company directly and request that the information about you be deleted. Companies will not object, but you will have to do everything manually.
An easier way to deal with “brokers” is paid services from a service like DeleteMe. This is an application and a company whose employees are ready for $129 a year to do all the routine work for you — to delete information about you from the internet and make sure that it does not fall into extraneous storage again.
Step 6: Maintain your anonymity
From now on, you should always be on the lookout to prevent your personal data from leaking to the Network. No social networks with your real name, and periodic monitoring of sites to make sure that no new information about you appears there.
To do this, you can use Utopia P2P. This is a decentralized ecosystem that does not monitor users and does not collect their personal data. All registration and use are completely anonymous. You create a nickname for yourself, and the ecosystem generates a private key for you, which opens access to your data.
What is P2P? You can read more information here.
The ecosystem is an arsenal of built-in tools for messaging, browsing, searching, file sharing, mining, trading, and gaming. All this is safe and free to use around the clock.
Remember, your anonymity and security are in your hands. Therefore, disappear from the available internet forever and becomes invisible to surveillance and hacker attacks.
Ensure your online anonymity right away!
