Editor’s note: This article was first published in December 2010. The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, Picasa (closed by Google in 2016) and Hotmail belong to that period, and the advice predates the EU right to be forgotten (2014) and the GDPR (2018).
More and more people are realising that their online past isn’t exactly flattering and want to delete every trace of themselves from the web, but sometimes the system itself makes this hard. To erase your past from the internet, we first need to know what the internet knows about us and which of our details it holds. You’ll be surprised how famous you are on Web 2.0.
Deleting your social media accounts is the easiest part, although the famous Facebook is the one that puts up the most obstacles. Even so, there’s a tool that will make you disappear without a trace.
First and foremost, let’s follow a few simple steps to find out what your past looks like online:
Go to Google and type your name in quotation marks (“text”). Repeat with your DNI (Spanish national ID number), your mobile and landline numbers, your postal address and your email accounts. Every site where you appear is a footprint you left in the past, and you’ll see that some of these searches turn up a great deal of information.
Deleting all those ads on dating sites, Hotmail and classified ads will have to be done by hand, but each site has its own form for removing that data, and they’re obliged to grant your request. If they don’t, you can always turn to the Spanish Professional Privacy Association (APEP, apep.es) or the Internet Users’ Association (Asociación de Internautas, internautas.org).
If you ever had a blog, go to the platform and delete all the posts, and don’t forget to check Google’s services in case you have any photos stored on Picasa or Flickr.
Now it’s the turn of social media. If you don’t want to go through them one by one, there’s a tool called the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine (suicidemachine.org) that will do all the work of removing your presence from social networks for you.
All you have to do is go to the site and give it the details it asks for, such as your username and password. The platform will send a plug-in, or bot, to delete your content completely, photos included, so make absolutely sure before you start, because once the process begins it can’t be undone.
Once you’ve done all this, you can start afresh online, but being more careful about the information you share, so that your past won’t worry you in the future.
Further reading
Featured image: Ervins Strauhmanis, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
