You’ll never be able to get a clean slate—but you can significantly downsize your digital footprint.
1. Delete or deactivate your shopping, social media and web service accounts
Think about which networks you have social media profiles on. Aside from the big ones (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn), do you still have old accounts on sites like Tumblr? MySpace? What about your Reddit account? Which shopping sites have you registered on internet? Common ones might include information stored on Amazon, Gap.com, Macys.com and others. And Now, Delete them.
2. Remove yourself from data collection sites
There are companies out there that collect your information. They’re called data brokers, and they have names like Spokeo, Whitepages.com and PeopleFinder, as well as plenty of others. They collect data from everything you do online and then sell that data to interested parties, mostly in order to more specifically advertise to you and sell stuff.
Now you could search for yourself on these sites and then deal with each site individually to get your name removed.
3. Remove your info directly from websites
First, check with your phone company or cell provider to make sure you aren’t listed online and have them remove your name if you are.
If you want to remove an old forum post or an old embarrassing blog you wrote back in the day, you’ll have to contact the webmaster of those sites individually. You can either look at the About us or Contacts section of the site to find the right person to contact or go to whois.com and search for the domain name on internet you wish to contact. There you should find information on who exactly to contact.
4. Remove personal info from websites
If someone’s posted sensitive information of yours such as a Social Security number or a bank account number and the webmaster of the site where it was posted won’t remove it, you can send a legal removal request to Google to have it removed.
5. Remove outdated search results
Let’s say there’s a webpage with information about you on it you’d like to get rid of — like your former employer’s staff page, months after you’ve changed jobs. You reach out to get them to update the page. They do, but when you Google your name, the page still shows up in your search results — even though your name isn’t anywhere to be found when you click the link on internet . This means the old version of the page is cache on Google’s servers.
6. And finally, the last step you’ll want to take is to remove your email accounts
Depending on the type of email account you have, the number of steps this will take will vary.
You’ll have to sign into your account and find the option to delete or close the account. Some accounts will stay open for a certain amount of time if you want to reactivate them.
An email address is necessary to complete the previous steps, so make sure this one is your last.
