How can you remove your presence from the Internet?

Question

How can you remove your presence from the Internet?

For example from social networks, from email servers, from forums etc. Problem is how records of you are identified on the internet?

We have well known services such as:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Youtube
• MySpace
• Stackexchange
• Warez forums

If know I have account on a particular server and if I know password I can log on and start deleting information.

There is a project: http://suicidemachine.org/ but I didn’t find anything more complex.

It is possible identify myself on internet by email, IP ... I don’t think use on this purpose google and type own email to google and search - is very simple.

Does some search engine exist which can find me on internet by my email, IP, nick or ...

Answer 1

I don't think it's really all that possible to remove yourself entirely. Go remove yourself from as many services you have accounts for, either by doing it yourself or asking the service provider to do it.

If you have a website, change it so that it only ever returns HTTP Response 410: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/410GoneThoughtsOnMarkDiveintomarkPilgrimsAndWhysInfosuicides.aspx. This will tell any consumers of the site that they should remove anything they have that originated from that site.

Stop posting anything by any of your online identities and hopefully people will stop reposting whatever you said, and eventually maybe the search engines will find stuff too old and they will stop indexing it. Unlikely though.

I'm sure that if you begged, pleaded, and sold your soul to them, Google might even consider listening to your request to have your identity removed from their indexes before they flag your name for further indexing. :)

Answer 2

Anything you ever wrote or published on the Internet is there forever. Trying to remove it is futile. Hordes of robots and search engines in dozens of countries that you have never heard of have already archived it and will never let it go, however nice you may ask. A few countries (e.g. France) offer Laws under which you can ask for removal of personal information, but there is a difference between asking and being granted, and such laws extend only to the country borders, not beyond.

Also, you cannot force people to forget. Mind control is illegal, and tricky.

Information can still be lost by being drowned into an ocean of other information. The Internet at large appears to be quite good at generating terabytes of meaningless junk, but search engines have improved too, and still manage to extract and index information within all that mess. One day, entropy will win, and grant you forgetfulness of your past actions.

In the meantime, Internet is like a ultimate responsibility machine. You have to be careful. One common way to evade having to live with your misbehaviours, that many people employ, is the use of pseudonyms -- and you already know that (unless "lop" is your real name, in which case you should sue your parents for cruelty).

Answer 3

It is not possible because most services do not permit removal at all and, even if some do, it is just a declaration most of them do not really delete but just hide that data.

This is too big topic but I'll give just a few hints that such attempts are senseless:

• the laws of most countries require to store most data and accountspassed through servers for many years; it is the matter of security - just imagine the cybercrime opportunities if accounts were really deleted;
• OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) databases are read-only and most approaches to data processing are that data are never deleted;
• when someone replied you in a forum with quoting, this quote with your account username quoted is still there publicly available to all even if you removed/hidden your account;

• "Yourself" is not just username(s), account(s), IPs, stored discussions, comments in isolation. It is most probably all of them (btw, interconnected and trackable) including the logo in ISPs servers about your connections to internet even during the time when you believe you are sleeping.

  Internet is not based or functioning on self-suicidal modes and as far as you connect to it, "Yourself" is part of it and attempts of self-suicide "Yourself" is synonym of killing the internet.

PS
Might be I did not understand the question.

Also, it is most probable, that we are trying to dispute the things without agreeing on common definitions of used terms first , what is also senseless.

Answer 4

It is not possible to eradicate your online presence but you can make it so much confusing that it become difficult for anyone to connect the dots. The grugq has a few guidelines that you need to follow:

1. Put the Plumbing in first
2. Create a cover (new persona)
3. Work on the legend (history, background, supporting evidence for the persona)
4. Create sub-aliases
5. Never CONTAMINATE

You cannot delete what you post online but you can control what you put online.

1. Never reveal your operational details
2. Never reveal your plans
3. Never trust anyone
4. Never confuse recreation with hacking (or anything else you want to hide)
5. Never operate from your own home or from one place
6. Be proactively paranoid
7. Keep personal life and online life separate
8. Keep your personal environment contraband free (it allows undue attention from LEA)
9. Don't talk to LEA
10. Don't give anyone power over you (in other words don't give anyone the information which might be used for blackmailing)

You can find further details in his presentation here

Answer 5

Disinformation. Propaganda. Censorship.

You might still be there, but the objective is to make it too much trouble for anyone to try to find you amidst all the crap.