How to remove information about yourself from the Internet

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

If you want to become a digital ghost and avoid someone's intrusive attention, get ready for a long struggle and hardship.

1. Delete social media profiles

Facebook

To delete your Facebook profile, go to this, enter your username and password, if necessary, and click "Delete account". The liquidation process takes up to 14 days.

Before that, you might want to upload a copy of everything you've ever shared on Facebook onto your disk. To do this, select "Download information", specify the required information and click "Create file". It will take some time. You will then receive a notification and can download all your data from Facebook in HTML format.

You may find that deleting a profile permanently is too radical a step. In this case, click "Deactivate Account". You will have the opportunity to restore it, if necessary, but other users will not be able to view your page.

Twitter

Open your account and select the "Disconnect your account" option. Then confirm your intention by clicking on the "Disable" button.

Before that, you may want to download your notes, photos and other information from the social network. To do this, follow the link "", enter your password, click "Confirm", and then - "Request archive" for Twitter and Periscope. The account can be restored within 30 days.

In contact with

Open and click "You can delete your page". Then confirm your intention by clicking "Delete page". The profile will be permanently deleted within a month.

Before you do this, you can download an archive with all your data to save it to yourself. To do this, go to and click on the "Request archive" button.

Instagram

Open Instagram. Select the reason why you want to get rid of the profile, enter your password and click "Permanently delete my account".

If you wish, you can simply temporarily block the profile. To do this, go to, select a reason, enter your password and click "Temporarily block your account". Then it can be restored.

To download all photos from Instagram before deleting, open and in the "Download data" section click "Request file". An email will be sent to you with a link to your data.

2. Delete other network accounts

Surely, in addition to social networks, you have a bunch of other accounts that you don't even remember about. To find them, you can use a service called Deseat.me.

Enter your email address and you will see all the accounts you have ever registered with it. Walk through them, selecting Keep or Delete. Then the service will send a message to the administration of the selected sites with a request to liquidate your account.

You may not want to wait for the management of some godforsaken resource to erase your data. If so, open Just Delete Me, enter the name of the site you want to delete from, and select it from the search results. The service will redirect you to the profile elimination page.

In addition, a resource called Account Killer may come in handy. It contains instructions for deleting accounts on a variety of services, including quite exotic ones. If you can't figure out how to disappear from a website and Just Delete Me didn't help, try searching for it in the Account Killer database.

3. Deal with non-disconnectable accounts

Sometimes the service simply does not provide an option to delete your profile. In such a case, you can try to find workarounds to ensure privacy.

Erase all the information you can from your profile. Change your name or nickname to an unreadable gibberish and delete the photos. Erase email addresses and phone numbers, or replace them with fictitious ones. Create a special e-mail, in the name of which there is nothing that can be associated with your name, and specify it in the settings instead of the real one.

So, at least, you will reduce the likelihood that some Internet stalker stumbles upon a page and immediately realizes that it belongs to you.

4. Google information about yourself

Now it's time to work with your hands and do what the services mentioned above cannot. Enter your first and last name into Google and see what he knows about you.

In addition, it is worth remembering and googling all the nicknames and pseudonyms under which you have ever registered on sites and forums. Also look for which pages your email and phone numbers are mentioned.

If you find yourself on some other service or in a half-forgotten social network, delete the profile from there manually. Surely there is a link to the page for deleting the account of the corresponding resource. If the service does not know anything about the site you are looking for, you will have to find the option to eliminate the profile in the settings yourself.

In the event that your data is mentioned on any resource or forum from where you cannot delete it yourself, contact the administration. Look for the "Contacts" section or try to find owners using the service.

Contact the authors of the site and ask them to delete your personal data. Most likely, they will meet you halfway. If the administration flatly refuses, and it is vital to delete the information, you will need to go to court at your place of residence or to.

Keep in mind that this is a last resort and carefully weigh the pros and cons. In most cases, it is easier to forget about some abandoned post on an unknown resource than to waste time and effort on all this red tape.

5. Remove information about yourself from the cache of search engines

After you have dealt with all your social networks, accounts and other data, search engines will have nothing to display about you. For some time some information can still be stored in their cache, but after a month or two it will disappear from there too.

If you want to speed up the removal of information from the cache, use special tools:

In addition, you may find it helpful to remove information, illegal content and from Google search results.

After eliminating information about yourself, Google yourself again after a few months and make sure that the data from the cache has been erased.

6. Remove the copy of your site from Archive.org

Perhaps you have your own website or blog that everyone can read. You deleted it, but it hasn't completely disappeared. A copy of it could remain in the archive - a service that creates copies of all the more or less significant pages on the Internet and stores them for a very long time.

There is no official way to remove a page in the Wayback Machine, but you can try writing to [email protected] asking to remove your blog from the archive. You may be helped if you give a really good reason.

7. Use the "right to be forgotten"

If your honor, dignity and business reputation have been damaged by any publications on the Internet and you cannot agree with the administration of the resource in the world, you can use the so-called “right to be forgotten”.

According to the Federal Law, Federal Law of July 13, 2015 N 264-FZ "On Amendments to the Federal Law" On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection "and Articles 29 and 402 of the Civil Procedure Code of the Russian Federation" of July 13, 2015 N 264 -FZ, any citizen of the Russian Federation has this right. This means that you can demand that the search engine remove from the search results links to inaccurate, unlawful, or irrelevant (when more than three years have passed since the event) information about you.

To exercise this right, you will need to fill out a special form.

By law, the search engine will have 10 days to provide you with an answer. Please note that the administration of search engines does not always meet the needs of users. Therefore, if you really need to delete the information, be prepared to pursue this in court.

8. Delete your Google account and email account

Finally, you can delete your Google account or any other email provider you are using. This is a serious step, but if the bridges are to be burned, then completely.

First, upload all your information that you can - use Google's settings to do this. There you can save not only mail, but also maps, history of actions and other information.

Most other postal services also provide the ability to download data. If your provider does not have this opportunity, and you need to keep the archive of letters, use some mail client, for example Thunderbird or Mail. Connect to your account using POP3, not IMAP. All letters will be downloaded to your local drive and you can make an archive copy of them.

Finally, delete your account. With Google, you can do this, for example, in the Download, Delete and Scheduling section. Click on the "Remove a service or account" button, then select "Remove Google account".

In other mail services, look for the corresponding item in your account settings.

Please note, however, that once you delete your account, Google will not allow you to register an account with the same name. Yandex will only use your name to register a new user after six months.

But other email services may not be as sensitive about your security. This means that a potential attacker, having created exactly the same address as yours, will be able to gain access to your accounts.

Therefore, before deleting your mail, carefully read the service help and find out what will happen with the account later. It may be safer to assign a strong password to the mailbox and then just forget about it than to delete it and then discover that it has been recovered by hackers.

Remember that it is impossible to permanently delete information about yourself from the Internet. By taking the above steps, you will reduce the risks that something unpleasant about you will surface on the Web.

But even if you delete all your accounts, no one can guarantee that the data will not continue to lie on the server of a particular service or provider. So always think carefully about what data you are uploading to the web before you hit the Upload button.