How to Erase Your Personal Information From the Internet (It’s Not Impossible!)

 Your shopping habits, your family members’ names, even your salary is out there for anyone to see. But you can take back control.

 The internet knows my age and home address. It knows how much I make and what I do for work. It knows when I last voted and who I voted for. Recently, I got married in a supposedly secret ceremony at city hall. The internet found out before my mother.

I didn’t willingly share this information, but I’m not at all surprised that it’s online. Personal data — the searches, photos, purchases, locations, and Facebook messages that populate digital identities and fuel the attention economy — is the internet’s favorite currency. It’s also becoming impossible to control.

That’s partly because the US lacks substantial data-privacy legislation. You’re not really protected against rampant data brokering on “background check” sites like Whitepages and BeenVerified, which scrape public records and compile information — like your home address and phone number — and make them painfully visible.

And yes, when we sign up for Instagram or order our dinners on Caviar, we might technically be voluntarily signing away our rights, but what other choice do we have? Privacy policies are tailor-made to obscure their murky contents, and few of us take the time to read the terms of service. Plus, “if you want complete control — if you want to opt-out, you’re going to lead a very limited life,” says Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

In 2019, data privacy landed in the spotlight when Russia-based photo-editing app Faceapp admitted that it was collecting metadata on user photos. The story resulted in Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) calling for an FBI probe, but such practices are common in Silicon Valley.

Social media is, after all, just a small piece of the data puzzle. “We really have two forms of digital selves,” explains Jen King, director of privacy at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University. “One is basically all the data that companies collect on us — that’s what you find in the hands of data brokers. The other is the one you construct, the one we curate and spend a lot of time trying to control. The two things overlap, but one is controlled by you and the other is not.”

As New York Times tech columnist Brian X. Chen discovered, even something as innocuous as a phone number can be used to reveal where you live, who you’re related to, and whether or not you’ve ever been arrested. This information can also be used to breeze past security questions used to secure online accounts.

This is bad — very bad — for physical safety. In 2014, video game designer Zoe Quinn was forced to move out of her house when trolls began posting photos of her apartment alongside graphic death threats — part of a harassment campaign known as Gamergate. “Your typical middle-class white guy living in Santa Clara might think, ‘What’s the worst thing that could happen to me?’ But vulnerable populations,” such as women and minorities, Galperin says, “are always the canaries in the coal mine.”

“People assume privacy is about how you communicate to another individual. They forget it also involves the extent to which you’re being tracked and surveilled online,” adds King. “In the US right now, I don’t know if there’s a good way to opt out. It’s really, really tough. But I haven’t given up hope that there will be federal-level change.”

Given the scale of the problem and the difficulty of staying completely offline, digital privacy is more important than ever before. How can you get it back? I posed the question to security researchers, reputation managers, and privacy advocates. Here’s their best advice for trying to erase yourself — either a little or a lot — from the internet.