Move country, change your name, change the industry in which you work and change the hobbies in which you are interested. Change the clothes you wear and your style of haircut.

All of that is a lot easier than trying to track down all lose-ends over the internet. You won't escape state-level actors if that is your concern but you'll have some distance between your offline and online history.

But if you want to be more deliberate about it, then the question you have to ask are "Who would be looking for you on the Internet and not like what they found?"

That runs the gamut from old classmates to people you're dating to current or future employers to federal agents.

Stay off Facebook and legally change your name, that will protect you from old classmates. If you're running away from bad reviews on dating sites you may need to change your name, move, and change your haircut and appearance. If you are worried about employers you'll probably need to change your social security or taxpayer ID. That gets into the realm of felony territory so you're going to want to be thoughtful about that. Without it though the IRS can connect all the dots and there are various ways background checks can do the same thing.

The alternative might be to try fuzzing, basically create a bunch of accounts with your name and be different people on each of them. That has the down side of obviousness in terms of obfuscation.

God, the fact that this is a thing makes me shake my head ...

"Delete my account" may be feel-good symbolism but AFAICT it rarely if ever makes a real difference to the subject (other than emotionally).

Joke: Nuke fb, ggle, crapple etc.

There are not.

Unless you're willing to spend millions, of course.

Doesn't seem all that unrealistic considering you probably won't have much legal ground to stand on.

>Seems a bit vague?

Yeah, that's the whole point...

Instead of the impossible task of making web pages with your name go away, instead, flood the internet with fake information tied to your name and identity. Create profiles with your real name, but everything else faked on popular sites. They'll have a better chance of crowding out pages you want to push down in search results if you make them actually valuable, versus just junk profiles. For example, a fake github identity, but with some actual useful project hosted there carries more weight. Or a profile (your name, faked job, faked photo) on LinkedIn that's tied to actual, insightful posts.

Not easy to do in a way that's there's enough volume to crowd out whatever you're trying to hide. But, it's certainly easier than trying to convince third parties to take down existing web pages.

http://www.darkreading.com/risk-management/apple-gets-patent...

TrackMeNot Firefox Add-on Keeps Search Engine Data Profilers Confused

https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/

Source: I do amateur level "reputation management" for friends that ended up with some problematic pages about them.

Most people's identity gradually changes over time. The usefulness of knowing what they've done comes entirely from being able to predict what they will do in the future. If all you've got is stuff > ~5 years old, it's virtually useless. Occasionally, if you're running for public office, some newspaper will dig up dirt of something inappropriate you did in college, but all you have to do is say "I'm horrified and ashamed that such embarrassing old stories have been dug up now, and they in no way reflect my beliefs or actions today" and most of the public will give you a pass. Most of them did pretty horrifying and shameful stuff when they were in college too.

This also suggests a general way to erase yourself from the Internet: just stop posting. Eventually, all of your old posts - if they don't get deleted by sites going out of business - will simply cease to be relevant, and becomes active misdirection for people trying to predict your actions now.

It is most definitely not that simple. You're giving people too much credit in thinking that they can let go of the past, rather than making snap judgments from first impressions. You really think an employer is not going to be negatively impacted by seeing an off-color racist joke in an old blog post you made in college? Especially if that blog post is the second thing that comes up in Google results after your LinkedIn page because you don't have anything else attached to your name?

No one cares about predicting your future if they have no interest in associating with you in the present.

It's good to stop making those racist jokes because it'll bias the folks who want to hang out with you towards those folks who a lot of other folks don't want to hang out with, but most people judge based on the present reality, and the ones who don't usually aren't folks that you'd want around you now anyway.

I think the best way may be to buy you properties through a shell company. Talk to your lawyer before doing this.

You might also have some existing accounts that you could edit/repurpose.

Surprisingly, a lot of websites/services don't even give you the option to delete your account.

Best method to delete yourself from the internet:

* make a list of all services you are on

* if a service lets you delete your account, delete it

* if there is no delete option, email customer support and ask them to delete your account. Most sites will not create a fuss about it though it takes time and lots of back and forth with the customer support

* search for yourself on google and ask google to remove links to your profiles(social media). They won't remove links to eg- articles about you, since it does not belong to you

Depending on how generous you were with your personal info, it is most likely not possible to delete yourself completely.

Funny story: I had a LinkedIn account where I signed up with only my email ID and gave no personally identifiable info(like a fake account). A few days later I get an SMS from LinkedIn telling me person XYZ sent me a request or something. How the f_uck did you get my number? To say the least, that scared me so I deleted the account.

Also note that when a service deletes your account and data, it is more often a soft delete so your data is still with them. Good luck getting a hard deletion of your account/data.

Come back to an old thread and it's full of [deleted] and "This comment has been deleted by a script blablabla by the way fuck you"

Maybe a good compromise would be to remove the user information after a certain time period (~2 years). Hashing the username salted with the post title would be a decent way of systematically respecting user privacy while also keeping old threads readable. I wouldn't mind if HN did this.

One day I'm going to run for office and I'm going to have to get lawyers to scrub HN of all my comments because they have no way for users to manage their content :-)

You could get away with something as simple as incremental ids in that case - user1, user2, etc.

Edit: for better readability it could be further mapped into a table of human readable handles, similar to how Google does the "Anonymous Lemur" thing in gDocs.

I'm not a lawyer, and admittedly haven't taken the time to look up the appropriate legal terms and other minutiae involved, rather relying on the kindness of my fellow commenters to extend to me the benefit of the doubt with respect to what I'm getting at, and helpfully clarify anything that needs to be. Thanks :)

There's almost nothing about most threads that will be of any long term interest to anyone - so you might as well allow them to auto-delete after a certain time.

1. Pay the domain registration for as long in advance as possible (I think it's 10 years). Also, pay for hosting of any web sites for as long as possible because:

2. Not only delete all the content, but set up the server to serve up a "410 Gone" response to every URL except for robots.txt. For that, you want:

    User-agent: *
    Disallow /

There are reasons for that. If the customer 'accidentally' deletes their data, and they have paid you money, restoring that account would be important for keeping their business. Also, if you have an abusive user, and they have paid for things in the past, they delete their account and file a chargeback, you can provide evidence against that user.

You also don't want a user who gets around the moderation system by posting abusive content then deleting it when it gets reported but before moderators see it, stupid stuff like that.

accountkiller.com

-dougl

At this point, forget about data privacy. If the data is out there, it's out there and you're never going to change that. The best you can hope for is for the actual practical consequences to be mitigated by effective legal constraints on what people can do to you based on your data.

In the US, there are a few examples of this kind of protection - the Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act prohibits genetic information being used to deny/price health insurance coverage, or to discriminate in employment. The Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) prohibits denial of health insurance coverage for (or due to) pre-existing conditions. (Note that life insurance in the US is not covered by these laws, so people who may ever need life insurance coverage would be ill-served by ANY kind of genetic testing for any reason - the information can only hurt you. And god help you if you have a bad credit rating; in most places you won't be able to get a decent job or housing.)

Many European countries have better protections against discrimination in housing, employment, and insurance coverage on the basis of personal data (in addition to granting individual rights over that data held by third parties.) As an American who suffered identity theft in the US and suffered all kinds of hassles for years as a result, the single thing that ameliorated them best was leaving the USA and moving to an EU member state.

EDIT: Of course I acknowledge a determined attacker could obtain all sorts of info about me. Not bragging or inviting doxxing, kthx.

- The email address, phone number, credit card number, and the SSN are still the canonical forms of identity in the data industry. You can almost always transact without an SSN, and the rest can be re-generated so that they don't follow you around, with some money and effort. For example, buy a burner domain, and use a different email address for each service (e.g. joespizza@user_id.lol).

Abine Inc. (I'm a customer, no other affiliation) offer a service which:

* Generates burner emails, and forwards mail to you

* Gives you a virtual phone number which forwards calls and texts (but which you can ditch/rotate)

* Virtual credit cards, no real name needed

I rolled my own solution for the email thing, but the cards and telephone numbers work great. Making-up outlandish names to buy cinema-tickets and burritos with is still entertaining my wife and I after a whole year!

They also have a service called 'DeleteMe' which I think is basically paying an intern to click-through all the opt-out forms of the data brokerages on your behalf.

That's a lot of work and won't erase everything, but it can help.

If you fill in an application to rent an apartment, or purchase property, your information ends up on the internet.

Our laws need to be updated for the internet age. There is public interest in knowing who owns the property at a certain address, but the reverse lookup of the same information--where does a certain citizen live--should be made illegal without the permission of the citizen.

With the unique biometric identification system (Aadhaar) being pushed heavily for various uses (not just subsidies alone, which is what it was intended to curb leakages in), the lack of a national privacy law, and the attorney general recently claiming in court that "privacy is not a fundamental right", things have never looked bleaker. The central (federal) government and state governments don't care about privacy and privacy protections. It seems like the masses, many of whom don't know much or don't care much, are being coerced into systems that can be heavily misused by those in power.

I'm not sure how your proposal would work in any case. If a database record with your name in it exists (because you bought a house, have a telephone number, got married, got arrested, etc.) looking up any permutation of that data is just a search. I don't know how you make that illegal.

It's true that some laws/decisions about what constitutes public data arguably made more sense when finding that data required making the effort to physically look through the physical files of some town clerk who was probably out for lunch. However, this has been a topic of discussion since companies started selling databases on CD-ROMs and nothing much has changed. So I'm inclined to think that genie is well out of that particular bottle.

This is not possible. The most you can do is make it slightly inconvenient to invert the Address -> Resident lookup.

I'm also not sure "public interest" is a valid justification to violate privacy in this way at all. Perhaps one shouldn't be able to look up who owns an address without some rigamorole.

Yes it does - that's exactly what "public" information is.

Maybe you can argue that some information shouldn't be public, but some things can't be hidden, like your date of birth or your name or your DNA, and those things are up for grabs by anyone who can collect them, for better or worse.

Non-profit: http://www.mydigitaltat2.org

I did all that. Currently the only place my full name shows on the internet in on Companies House, because they keep those records, for almost 20 years after you close a company. And those same records get published by third parties also. Other than that, I'm GHOSTING.

Second, use the right to be forgotten laws in Europe (even if you aren't European). They've got Google by the balls and at the very least you'll be scrubbed from google pages in Europe, perhaps very soon - or not - you'll be scrubbed from Google worldwide.

Third, might want to change your phone number. But at the very least, even if you have poor impulse control or are too attached to do the first step, just remove your phone numbers from your social media accounts. Uninstall those apps from your phone. Clear your cookies. The main goal is to disassociate your phone number from social. You inadvertently upload it in a variety of ways, and this is a key component to their graphs. Changing it is better because your friends upload your number anyway. Now you will have a new number and no social media profile linked to it.

Fourth, be conscious of what/where you post. Now that you won't have privacy anxiety, this will be much easier to pay attention to.

Fifth, at your leisure, send sternly worded 'remove this content' emails to any web pages that still reveal info about you. Don't do this from free email and gmail accounts, do it from more authoritative sounding domain names. But in the email, refer to yourself as "my client"

This isn't quite accurate.

The search results are only removed for browsers within Europe.

Google will only removed "outdated" or "irrelevant" search results.

Google approve less than half the requests it gets for RtbF.

Remember: you can decrease the signal-to-noise ratio by decreasing the signal, or by increasing the noise.

I personally found that having a very very common name provides a lot of privacy. If you look me up by my real firstname/lastname, you'll find out we are borg, we are 1000s, and I'm burried somewhere far and deep in the search results.

The worst of both world though is probably having an almost unique name that you share with someone notorious who could plausibly be you for reasons of age, location, etc. I once knew someone who shared names (in the pre-Web era) with someone who was a widely hated figure at one point in NYC. My acquaintance literally got death threats on his answering machine aimed at this individual.

disclaimer - I happen to know digital shadow from event I once attended. I'm not associated with them and for that matter I had not used their product, however I find the idea pretty interesting and kinda cool :-)

Best thing is delete all your accounts, request any mentions of you to be removed, and as others said change your name so that things like Zoominfo and bots don't pick up on you.

How do you approach applying for jobs? Do you make a fake resume/CV? Or just a new empty one focused more on "skills" vs job history?

And what do you say when they ask about job experience? Honesty, I guess, but it might make them curious/suspicious/nosey.

- No, Facebook is worse.

- How?

- Herpes goes away when you die.

It's called "reputation management" by some.

As an example of (3), sites like Ripoff Report won't remove info, but, if you can get a copyright logo or photo onto a Ripoff Report page, you can DMCA google & have the entire page unindexed.

maybe not so much because any measure you come up with will be met by countermeasures from the data aggregators and your business model is reliant on the companies complying with your data deletion request

The banking system is loaded with KYC rules; you will need to steer clear of it. Do not get an ID at all unless the photo no longer resembles you and the address listed on it checked out at the time but is no longer considered a threat (remember that your old neighbors might sit with a sketch artist or remember a comment in passing about where you might be headed next). Obviously no car registration or driving. Switch transit fare cards frequently; be careful of the CCTV cameras on the farecard vending machines.

Use distinct prepaid device for each call. Make your way to a pseudorandom location (the locations of all your calls plotted on a map should not let anyone infer the general vicinity of your home, workplace, or where you might surface next). Make the call over a unique Signal account, be brief, and securely destroy the phone.

Obviously no flying, and especially no crossing international borders. You most certainly cannot do anything predictable like show up at your parents' house at Christmas.

If you must use email, use Tails, use a different email address and PGP key for every message, come up on secondhand laptops over Tor on public wifi at places that can't individually identify laptop users mechanically, and places too busy to remember the faces of specific laptop users.

Obviously, social media of any form, any sort of communication (even letter-writing) with people who won't apply this tradecraft as carefully as you every single time with no exceptions ever, legitimate employment, anything licensed, and anything related to the banking system are totally out of the question.

... by now it should be clear that "dropping off the grid" is almost certainly not what you want to do, and that 95% of what you have to fear from "the grid" has been here long before social media and doesn't care that you deleted your Facebook account, because it is integral to every part of life.

The relation name ~ face ~ residence ~ phone ~ email ~ occupation ~ employer ~ financials is probably not something you actually want to "erase" or keep secret, unless you are willing to go to extreme lengths. And at that point, the government's "someone is using tradecraft" senses will likely go off, and they'll likely come at you with some old fashioned human intelligence work that your Hacker News sensibilities won't protect you against.

You might want to think more deliberately about which pieces of information you're trying to disassociate from that relation, because that's a much more tenable project.

Some people may be combatants by things other than actions of violence. Wearing an enemy uniform even if you are not holding a rifle or actively participating in a battle, spying, providing serious material aid to the combatants etc.

I think these are apt comparisons to privacy and personal information because having them is a sort of ephemeral habeas corpus (I'm aware of the contradiction). You 'have the person' (that's what habeas corpus literally means) in a digital/information sense. Of course there's no exclusivity as there is with an actual bodily person.

Warfare is ultimately about controlling the bodies - you kill the bodies and then you win. If more of your bodies are standing or if more of their bodies can be convinced to stop fighting or to come over to your side or just lose the will to fight then you win (trying to encompass more than just battlefield warfare here which is quickly becoming less important)

So this very long winded setup is just to say that the "future of personal identity cleanup" is an oxymoron or at least a contradiction. "Hiding" whether digitally or otherwise is an ACTIVE thing. I guess the cleaning concept is useful to a degree. If I clean my kitchen then it stays clean...until I make dinner the next night - which, because I need to eat, I will inevitably do. And then it's just as messy and requires just as much effort as it did previously to clean.

So unless you are dead, you can't just clean up your digital trail and be done. This is assuming that you want to go about living a relatively normal life and not smuggle yourself to an uninhabited island.

So the future of digital privacy will be a series of compromises and trade offs. I don't want to be at all disrespectful about the situation in Syria because it is grief ridden disaster but I think this illustration is a good one.

There are still people in Syria. You may think to yourself, "Why are people still in Syria? People with families". Because some people can't leave, some people don't think it's that bad for any number of reasons such as blind luck, blind faith or any other form of blindness. Regardless they are still there.

And that's how digital privacy is. Most people won't care which means there won't be a demand which means you will stand out when you do demand (to be not seen)

This is too long.

TLDR:

1: TOOLS - tools to help you just like new kitchen gadgets. Some will be fads, some will be workhorses like the classic kitchenaid mixer and others will be just for pros or people with a passion for it.

2. KNOWLEDGE - Knowing how to hide what you really want to hide. This is going to be helped more and more by tech. People who don't want to hide anything won't ever know about these but those who do will. Starts with VPNS, separate accounts, never bringing a device with an EMF signal to certain places, how to use strong encryption etc. but includes basic digital tradecraft.

3: COMPROMISE - Don't ever use social media. Or do and realize that part of your life is never going to get a privacy cleanup. It's the fryolator of your digital life. Makes things delicious, unhealthy and never clean. Other compromises and realizing that just like credit, it's hard to repair mistakes in digital privacy.

The question is so simple. . . . I wish the answer was. Sorry this is so rambling. I was going to include a why you should listen to me section but then I'd have to tell you who I am.

What's worse than all the information being out there, or parallel I guess, is that the shitty service had a bunch of information wrong. It said I lived in a state where I co-signed a lease for my sister (and since I have the same last name as my sister the service drew the conclusion we were married), it said that I still owned a home in yet another state (I had sold it years before)... It also returned my year-by-year income (most of which was fairly accurate), court records (even from when I was a little kid showing up at my parents' divorce hearing), and the exact amount I still owed on my house. No clue how they got all that shit.

Around that time I went looking for ways to purge it all, I stumbled across this post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/j1mit/how_to_re...

I filled out every opt-out form I could find.

Here we are, 5 years later... I can say... a few less scammy sites show up when you search for me... but on the whole not really much impact. A bunch of information these sites have is still wrong, and a lot of the sites... even if you go through all the trouble of opting out... they only honor the opt-out for a year.

I asked my lawyer if there was a way, how do celebrities and such keep their records out of these people's hands... and his response was, "You probably have to contact each site and pay then to take you off..." At which point I decided to cheer if anyone ever fire-bombed the offices of Radaris or Spokeo or Yatedo or any of the other shit-information sites.

We need laws that make it legal for us to all kick the CEO of these companies in the nuts -- one good solid kick each. Freedom of information, all that... necessary for democracy... and it's just a short hop from there over to aggregation services... but we should at least ensure that people who want to profit off eroding privacy shouldn't be able to reproduce.

Seems like there was an update to that post.

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/31u84n/how_to_r...

To be clear, just in case anyone reading does not understand, this would have no impact as data is now routinely stored at multiple, geographically disparate data centers run by disparate companies within completely distinct legal jurisdictions, as contracted by distinct legal entities, and these are increasingly all kept secret via services like Cloudflare, corporate service agents, DNS privacy services, international accountants and lawyers.

So... don't go getting firebombing ideas. Instead, take your pyro inklings out through the retro game Pyro ][ in which our protagonist begins by burning down the IRS - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pyro+2+abandonware

You'd have to take out the satellites too, though - I forgot about that. All the satellites.

But there is a creepiness factor. As someone who is fairly visible publicly and deals with a lot of PR people etc., there's a fine line between finding areas of common interest/conversation starters and we ran a creepy background check on you.

Most of that stuff is pretty easy to find on local records, it's just a dumb aggregator, they are getting the information from elsewhere.

If I had time I'd be able to find 80% of that information on you now. If I had access to a few nonpublic databases (like a PI would) I'd have access to everything. And since I am a smart human not a dumb machine id probably be able to tell most of the innacurate information was inaccurate.

I could create plastic rice and sell it... but I'd be a horrible person for doing so. Just like these people that created the aggregators. Pathetic waste of life ass hats... can't think of anything good for society... so they shit on it.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/23/africa/nigeria-fake-plastic-ri...

The guy who bought Epi Pen and jacked the price because he could... also deserves to have his genes removed from the pool.

Let's say you want to buy a house and apply for mortgage. The bank can either look at your credit history to determine your probability of default, or not look at your credit history and assume your probability of default is the same as US average. The bank uses this probability and prime rate to decide what interest rate to offer you.

If you paid your bills on time in the past, your credit history would be clean and you'll get a better rate.

Huge difference between that, and just throwing all the information out there to the wind. Certainly your insurance rates would go down if all your health info were made public and the insurance provider was allowed to factor that in, right? It's creepy, it makes the world a worse place for existing.

I guess what's nice is that when someone does a search, they probably know most of these sites aren't all that accurate to begin with... But my comments were more around how it would be nice to stop the spread of some things... companies that work to make a buck eroding our privacy for starters. I could set up a truck on the street in front of your house... document everything about you for a few months... it's creepy.

On that note, the way to kill these sites off would be to just have Google de-list these sites. Now, I get that Google won't actually de-list sites... but treating them like the scammers they are would be a good change the the SERP ranking algorithm.

No, not really. They just have to ask you if it's OK preform that query from a Consumer Reporting Agency (CRA) and have regulations around informing you about the sources they used to make decisions. Same for any 'background check' company. But if you want to participate in society you're going to have to authorize these sorts of searches... There's not a whole lotta choice.

In the US The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) regulates how the CRAs use that information.

I'm no expert, but I believe the FCRA only applies if the information is being used to make credit, insurance, employment, housing, etc. decisions. It doesn't apply for personal curiosity. That's why those sites say "you agree not to use this information for employment, housing purposes, etc." When you use them.

It's probably more useful to read the FCRA rather than listening to me though.

It's already happening, the only difference being that it's the people rather than insurance providers that make those decisions. Healthy young people do not buy insurance (because they will pay more in premiums than amount of healthcare they consume), premiums go up because average remaining customer needs more healthcare, etc. In the limit premiums are sky high and nobody has insurance. That's why universal health care makes sense.

The key difference is that people have little control over their health, but a lot more control over how much they work, how much they spend, and whether they pay their bills on time.

Scammers? Your comments lead me to believe the exact opposite.

Credit bureaus and companies like Axciom or DataTree collect, keep and sell tons of data.

At the very least you should request your credit report (it's free if you don't want FICO score) and check that everything in it is correct. This is not the last time someone pulled a background check on you.