Yes, you are reading it right. You can now hide your presence from the World Wide Web. Your personal data is often stored with the free service providers. This is because when you first sign up for their services, you opt in to all types of difficult provisions.
Hence you are looking for your online privacy such as deleting or deactivating yourself from the internet wheresoever possible.
Unfortunately, it is impossible for you to remove yourself entirely from the internet. But, there are some measures for sure to minimize and limit & restrict the scope of your data getting public.
However, keep this in mind that when you limit your online footprint, your potential employers may find it difficult to communicate with you.
Here are 6 interesting methods to hide yourself from the internet.
1. Delete or Deactivate Your Online Accounts
Find out the sites (other than the bigger ones) which are less used by you and delete your account from them. Counting on the account you might treasure under something related to Privacy or Security.
If you want to remove these accounts, then go to settings and search for option for deactivating, removing or closing your account. You can also use a service called DeleteMe for removing your footprint.
DeleteMe comes with DIY guidelines, if you wish to delete yourself from the internet by following the process on your own.
If something is troubling you to delete an account you can change the information in the account to some factual info rather than your real information.
2. Erase Yourself from Data Broker Websites
This may sound a little creepy as anyone can study your personal details like phone number, residence address, any criminal record etc in a few minutes. This information can be availed by paying a little amount to the data broker. Most of the time, the information is freely available.
Primary data brokers gather data from public records. Secondary data brokers accumulate data from the primary brokers. Also, they make addition of data which are collected from social networks and other online platforms.
When this information float around the internet, it can be dangerous. It can be easily available yo the troll which would result in ultimate harassment for years.So it is wise to pay the data broker sites and request them to have your information removed.
Also, remember that once you remove yourself from the data broker sites, you will get yourself removed from the Google search results. Therefore, it will be difficult for people to find you.
3. Use of VPN
Generally, most of the mass are used to web-based facilities. Giving up the virtual activities is not easy, once you are habituated to it. Thankfully VPN (Virtual Private Network) services exists. You can now browse privately. Additionally, you can apply this service in order to encrypt your connection.
Thus, making the job of hackers difficult. In the corporate world VPN allow employees far away generate an encrypted connection. This will enable them to work harmlessly. But not only the corporates even, general public can use VPNs too.
4. Delete Personal and Sensitive Information from Websites
If somebody posted any private information of yours like a bank account number or a Social Security Number and the webmaster of the website where it got published, is not going to remove it. In such case, you can send Google a legal request asking it to remove it.
The deletion process is very time-consuming and there is no guarantee that it will be successful.
5. Delete Outdated Search Results
Suppose there exists a webpage containing data about you and you want to get it removed. If you wish to update the page, the old page still comes in the search results. This is because the old version of the webpage is cached on the servers of Google.
You can furnish the URL to Google with an expectation that it will modify the servers by removing the cached search results. This will help you to remain no longer a part of the page.
Although there lies, no guarantee that Google will delete the cached information. But definitely you can give a try to remove as much as presence from the internet.
6. Close Down your Email Accounts
This is a huge step as email is the most popular form of communication in the world. The number of steps you need to go through totally depends on the type of email you are using. First of all, get yourself signed in to your account and search for the option to delete or shut your account.
There are some accounts which remains open for a certain period, you can activate them again when you wish to. You should note that an email is a compulsory thing to successfully finish the previous steps, so make this your last one.
Ending Note
I hope after going through this post you can easily delete yourself from the internet to some extent. You need to be patient while undergoing the process as this won’t complete in a day. also, you should accept that there are certain things which you cannot remove permanently from the internet.
