Introduction

If you are here in this article and interested in reading it means that you are personal information is available to the public and the term public means that your information is everywhere. Now you may be wondering how you can delete or prevent yourself from the companies that are acquiring your info. In short, you can’t. Unfortunately, you can’t remove yourself completely from the internet but there are certain ways to reduce your online footprint in return it will lower the chances of your data getting out there. Let’s have a look in the following ways.

1.  Delete or deactivate social, service provider and shopping accounts

Brainstorm which social network you have made the profiles on. Apart from the big companies such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, you may have accounts on Google+, Tumblr and even Reddit. To get rid of these sites, go to your settings and look for the option to deactivate, close or remove your account. You may find it under privacy or security or something similar to these terms. In case you are having any difficulty in deleting your account then change your info into something different other than actual info. In other words fake or completely random.

2.  Remove yourself from data

There are companies that are interested in and collecting your data. They are collect data brokers and they called Whitepages.com, Spokeo, PeopleFinder as well as essay writing services tons of others. They track your data from everything you do online and then sell that data to the interested parties, mostly they do in order to advertise you and sell you more stuff.

An easy way to do it is to use a service like DeleteMe at joindeleteme.com. In just $129 per year, this service will jump through all those tedious loops for you. They will even check every few months in order to make sure that these sites whether re-added you or not.

However, if you remove yourself from these sites means that you will also remove yourself from Google search results and this makes harder for the people to find you.

3.  Remove your info directly from the websites

First thing first check your phone number to make sure that you are not listed online and if you then remove the name if you are. If you want to remove your old embarrassing blog or an old forum post which you wrote back then contact the webmaster of those sites. You can look to the Contact or About us sections of the site to find the right person to contact or go to the site and search for the domain name which you wish to contact. You can find plenty of information on who exactly you have to contact. However, private website operators are under no obligation to remove the posts. So if you are going to contact these sites then be polite, clear and concise with the statement with them on why you want to remove the post. Hopefully, they will follow through and remove it.

4.  Remove personal info from the websites

If someone has posted the sensitive and confidential information of yours on the social security number or a bank account number and the webmaster is not removing it then you may send a legal request to Google to remove it. This removal process may take some time and there is no guarantee that it will be successful but the best option is to find yourself in a vulnerable situation.

Final words

Keep in mind to be inpatient when going through this scary process and don’t set an expectation to complete it in one day. And you also have to accept that not everything you can delete permanently from the internet.