Disappearing online completely is nearly impossible, but there are options to reduce your digital footprint.Andranik Hakobyan (Getty/iStockphoto)
Doing a search for oneself on the internet can set off alarm bells: old photos of oneself, information from accounts, from services that were opened years ago and of which there was no longer any record, comments lost in blogs... Internet does not forget and once something is published, control of the information is completely lost.
On the other hand, personal and professional circumstances change, and this out-of-control information on the web can be a double-edged sword.
Political candidates know this well, when a revision and cleaning of
expired
content is necessary .
It is becoming more and more common for someone to want to completely disappear from the network, so that when typing their name, absolutely nothing appears.
It may be due to a sudden awareness of privacy or labor issues, but you are trying to remove your personal information from the Internet.
Although… Is it really a good thing that there is no trace of one on the internet?
"Today, not having a digital footprint is counterproductive, and that generates a certain amount of mistrust," explains Daniel López, CEO and co-founder of Youforget.me, a platform dedicated to managing user privacy on the Internet.
This expert recommends "managing our digital selves" so that the information available online is consistent with the person's profile "and inspires that trust."
Is it possible to completely disappear from the internet?
"I would say no," explains Alejandro Abascal, founder of the Remove Group, a company dedicated precisely to erasing personal information from the web.
“There are many environments on the internet that are impossible to control, like the
dark web
”, he adds.
However, you can remove “the vast majority of traffic” related to yourself;
In this sense, this expert affirms that the "new legislation at the European level" that is evolving to respond to this need, such as "the right to be forgotten, the right to honor on the Internet or the data protection law".
This legislation protects the citizen "unless you are a notorious person of public interest, in which case it conflicts with freedom of information."
In this second case, the line that separates the right to privacy and the right to information is very fine and subject to interpretation, which generates "an important controversy, generating one of the great debates," says the expert, in terms of privacy.
Delete inactive accounts
To delete all traces of the network, you should start with the simplest: delete inactive accounts of those services that are not used.
Unfortunately, and unless a detailed record of everything is kept, the only way to surface these pages is to do your own search on Google to discover the trace of our presence on the network.
The bad news is that it's not always easy to remove personal information, and in fact, there are some sites that make it nearly impossible to remove it.
More information
Guide to delete (forever) files from a computer or mobile phone
The JustDelete.me online directory presents information deletion instructions for the main web sites, along with a curious traffic light indicating their level of difficulty.
As we have advanced, some of them are shown with the "impossible" sign due to the amount of difficulties presented by the service provider.
Delete profiles on social networks
Social networks have become a great repository of personal information, in which, with a little time and patience, you can draw a profile of the person and their activity simply by threading their posts.
Anyone wishing to ostracize the network and control their information should consider completely deleting their accounts.
Facebook was in the eye of the hurricane and became the target of a campaign that invited its users to delete their accounts, due to the massive data leak that took place in the Cambridge Analytica case.
The big problem is that not only the information that is published on networks offers great personal information about the user of the same, but it is also never deleted.
"Our memory will continue to be present once we have died," warns Daniel López, "and it is essential to manage these networks, eliminating those that are in disuse or that do not represent us."
Request removal
Immediacy rules on the Internet: you sign up for a service and enjoy it instantly.
Does the same thing happen when you want to unsubscribe from it?
It will depend on the service, but the general answer is no.
And going the other way is, if not tortuous, impossible in some cases.
But there is no other choice but to go through it.
The first thing that someone who wants to completely disappear from the Internet (or at least be irrelevant to search engines) should do is do a Google search for themselves and point to those sites where they appear.
The best thing in these cases is to use a hyperlink storage service such as Pocket or Instapaper in which to store the different websites in which our name appears.
For what purpose?
To request one by one the deletion of data.
Service providers "have a period of thirty days" to resolve a demand for data deletion, as Alejandro Abascal points out, "if it is a large platform, there are fifteen days more than the response period."
In the event of no response from the services that host our personal information, the next step is to "request the removal from the search engines themselves," recommends Abascal.
If the water tap is closed, the flood ends, although not really: "The search engines only have the obligation to eliminate the name", with which photos, videos and other memories will remain visible and on the servers of the companies that deny account deletion.
“Sabotage” those who refuse
As we have previously pointed out, the services do not always respond to the request for deletion of the data, with which all the user's information remains visible on the network almost permanently.
In this case, the maxim of “if you can't beat your enemy, join him” applies to its fullest extent: the next objective will be to confuse the seekers using their own tricks.
In what is known as
infosuicide
, the next thing a desperate user can do is fill the web with empty references to him.
As?
Creating pages with the name of one with neutral content, which neither compromises nor provides information.
As an alternative solution, it also serves to modify our name and make it unintelligible in rebel services that deny the user's right to disappear.
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