Tech Friday: Is there too much of YOU on the Internet?
Posted By RichC on December 3, 2021
As years of your personal information accumulates on servers across the Internet, do you ever wonder just how much of your data has evolved from a generic interpreted sketch, to a 
colorful painting with specific details … to now a high resolution gigabyte sized photo of you and your life?
Well it is past due time to clean up what you can and limit just how much personal data you share … and as a friend commented to me, “overload the databases with as much bogus and inaccurate information as possible” …although I’m not sure if that is possible?
Can really delete yourself from the Internet? Doubtful, but perhaps the advice of cybersecurity journalist Malcolm Higgins can help.
How to remove personal information from the internet
If you’ve been using the internet for years, untangling your information from the Web won’t be easy. When you share something online, you usually give up control of that piece of data. It may still belong to you, but it’s very difficult for you to limit who has access to it and what it’s used for.
The first step will be to understand what’s out there so you know what you’ll have to scrub away to disappear.
- Data scraping: There’s now a whole industry built around “data scraping” — companies will take the information you put online, store it in databases, and then sell it on to other businesses and organizations. Deleting your data from their databases may be very difficult or impossible, but we’ll discuss a few potential methods below.
- Old accounts: It’s easy enough to track down and delete, anonymize or hide accounts you use every day. But what about old accounts on forgotten or defunct sites? Will you be able to delete them all – if you can even find them?
- Caching: Let’s say you delete a page with information about yourself. It may still take a while before mentions of that page (and your data) disappear from search engine results. That’s because that data may be stored in their caches for quick access when people search for you.
Internet scrubbing is a challenge, but it’s not impossible and it is your right. We’ll go over everything step by step.
Delete social media and online shopping accounts
Deleting yourself from the internet is a long journey. The first place you need to visit is your social media. The companies behind these platforms hoard your data, and your social profiles will often be the first ones to come up in Google searches.
