These days it’s easy to find almost anyone just with their online presence.
Some people simply don’t want to be found, but it may be overwhelming to try and delete yourself.
Follow these six tips to delete your online presence as thoroughly as possible
First, delete and deactivate any social media, shopping, and web service accounts that may exist.
While some are obvious like Facebook or Twitter, others may be forgettable.
Old Tumblr and MySpace accounts may still exist, or Pinterest and Reddit.
For shopping, what about the time you bought one thing online from BestBuy? All these accounts should be found and deleted.
Delete them by going into account settings on the accounts and finding the option to deactivate, remove or close an account.
If there is no way to find a way to delete the account, then the information can be changed to completely false information with a fake name.
Second, remove yourself from sites that collect data.
Places like Spokeo, Whitepages and PeopleFinder are data collection sites that sell people’s data for a fee. The data is from things you do online.
The easiest way to remove yourself is to use services like DeleteMe. It’s $129 per years and deletes you from every site as well as double checks every few months to make sure you’re gone.
What will also happen is you’ll remove yourself from Google Search.
Third, remove all of your information directly from websites.
Call your phone company or cell phone service provider to make sure you aren’t listed online. They can remove you if you are.
For old posts or blogs, contact the site directly to have it removed. They may or may not do it.
Fourth, remove all personal information from websites. If someone posted really sensitive information and the person in charge of the site won’t remove it, send a legal removal request to Google.
Fifth, remove outdated search results.
This can happen if your information was deleted from a website but that site still pops up in Google Search.
This means it’s cached. Submit the URL to Google letting them know it’s outdated and incorrect and they will hopefully delete it from their servers.
Finally, remove all email accounts.
This one needs to happen last in order to do the other five things.
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