How to delete yourself from the internet

We’re starting here because you’ve already got personal information doing the rounds online—pretty much everyone does. So the first thing you’ll need to do is interrupt the flow of what’s already out there. There are a couple of things you can do to make this happen.

Stop companies packaging and selling your personal information online and off

There are companies—called data brokers—that specialize in collecting, organizing and selling personal information. They get your personal data by scraping the web, purchasing or otherwise acquiring ready-made profiles, or a combination of the two. The most visible data brokers are commonly known as “people finder” or “people search” sites.

You can see examples of these sites, and the information they have on you, simply by performing a web search for your full name, address or phone number. These sites will likely show you a free “teaser” of your profile, with the full records being locked behind a paywall.

It gets worse: people search sites are just the tip of the data brokerage iceberg. Many data brokers operate in the background, selling personal information to other businesses and organizations rather than putting it on websites aimed at individuals. You won’t find these companies by simply searching for your details, but they’re out there. Hundreds of them.

Social media platforms are careful to use words like “share” when encouraging users to publish content, including personal information. “Sharing” makes it sound like you have some control over who sees what you post. But “publishing” is more accurate: social media posts are public by default.

The best advice is as predictable as it is inconvenient: delete your social media accounts to protect your privacy and delete yourself from the internet. Short of doing that, here’s a list of things you can do to limit the damage:

• Switch from mainstream social media platforms like Facebook and X (Twitter) to decentralized and open-source platforms like Mastodon.
• Set any social media profiles you decide to keep to private mode, so that only people you know and trust can see your posts.
• Check and double-check anything you decide to post publicly for personal information, this will become second nature sooner than you might think.
• Turn location services off on mobile devices before posting, many social media platforms will grab this information from your device, some will append it to your posts.
• Check photos for anything that could reveal personal information, look out for reflections, documents, screens (that show private information), and unique identifiers like car registration plates.
• Strip photos of metadata—metadata is text that’s automatically attached to photos and contains a lot of information about the location at which the photo was taken as well as the device on which it was taken.
• Apply the same level of caution when uploading video and audio recordings.

The same holds true for any blogging or vlogging you do, the comments you leave on various platforms, and anything you post on forums.

Stop your devices from leaking personal information

The above best practices come into play when you’re actively publishing information online, but a lot of personal data leaves your devices when you’d least suspect it. Here are just some examples:

Mobile apps and computer programs that have been granted access to location data, device information, microphone and camera inputs, and files (including documents, photos, videos and audio recordings) can leak personal information while you’re not even using them. Such apps and programs might have been set up to “dial home” periodically and upload your data. This might be necessary to support their features, or it might be to harvest data that’s then sold to advertisers in order to generate revenue—free apps are often monetized in this way.

Even apps developed with the most honest of intentions and collecting only the bare minimum of data can be hijacked by malicious actors (think: hackers) and have any data they have access to stolen (“breached”).

Delete any apps and programs you haven’t used in a while. For particularly data-hungry apps like Facebook, Amazon, and so on, consider using the respective websites instead.

Web browsers

Browsers are a special category of app or program, mainly because we do so much through a browser. They have access not only to hardware (like cameras and microphones), but also information (in the form of files) and—perhaps most importantly—to users’ behaviour and movements across the web. And no, “incognito” or “private” mode doesn’t do anything to help you here.

Diligently research any browser you decide to use. Options like Google’s Chrome are very secure but not private, whereas something like Mozilla’s Firefox is both secure and private. Stick to well-known and trusted browsers, avoid new browsers that don’t have an established track record, and watch out for browsers that had a good reputation in the past but have since changed hands.

Games can take a lot of resources to develop and maintain, so you might wonder how so many impressive-looking browser-based games can be offered for free. Often, it’s by collecting and selling or otherwise monetizing personal information. Avoid free online, especially browser-based, games. Be particularly wary of games with development teams from countries like China and Russia.

Again, even games produced by the most trustworthy and well-intentioned developers can be breached by third parties. Any stockpile of personal data is going to be a target for hackers and other bad actors.

Operating systems

This is one that’s more for the technically minded, but it’s worth keeping in mind for everyone. The operating system on your device (whether Windows, macOS, Android or iOS) has access to everything you do on that device. Both Microsoft and Apple harvest personal data from their users, and both have business interests in protecting that data from competitors and bad actors.

There are two problems here: Microsoft and/or Apple having vast stores of your personal data is a bad thing in and of itself, and neither company is able to guarantee the security of that data—both have suffered and continue to suffer data breaches.

Alternatives exist, mainly in the form of Linux and the BSDs. These operating systems are open-source, meaning that anyone can review their source code to look for security vulnerabilities and privacy threats. As a result of this transparency, and the general absence of corporate interests, these systems are both more secure and more private.

The catch is that these operating systems are unfamiliar to most people, and can take some getting used to. Although the Linux operating system in particular has many extremely user-friendly “versions” (called distributions) available, and almost all of them are readily given away, free of charge.

We covered how publishing personal information online can jeopardize your privacy, but you don’t have to actively post things yourself for the information to get out there. If you’re active online, and especially if you do a lot of online shopping, you can easily have hundreds of online accounts out there. Many of which you probably only used once, to grab that Black Friday deal, for example.

Apart from the fact that you’re effectively trusting dozens if not hundreds of companies to not misuse your data, you’re also trusting that they won’t leave that data unsecured, that they won’t be bought out by less scrupulous companies, and so on.

The solution is simple, but it might require some tedious work: delete any accounts you don’t need anymore. If you’ve been using a password manager (like Bitwarden), this shouldn’t be too difficult. Otherwise, search through your emails for keywords like “welcome” and “verification” to ferret out evidence of old accounts.