Analysis: people usually do not realise how much information is out there about them - and the work required to remove it
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There are a variety of reasons why you might want to remove yourself or part of yourself from the internet and start all over again. You may have personal reasons, such as embarrassing photos with a former partner. You may wish to clean up your online presence as you start looking for a job. You might be concerned about online privacy and the divisive nature of social media and you just want to get out or you might want to start again because you are a victim of something like revenge porn.
Whatever the reason, people usually do not realise how much information there is out there about us and the huge job it is to remove your online record. First, there is the public part that you control because you created it, like posts on your social media or comments on YouTube. If you have the patience, you can go through those one by one and remove them.
If it is more than just individual items you want to remove then you can ask social media platforms to remove you entirely. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and others all do this but with slightly different processes.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Today With Claire Byrne, Prof Alan Smeaton on how to delete yourself from the internet
Beware of the difference between deletion and deactivation. Deactivation is like temporarily retiring and you can return whenever you want whereas deletion is exactly that, delete forever with no coming back. Deleting yourself can take weeks to happen, as there being a cooling off period where you can change your mind. The companies do not make doing this easy because they don't want to lose you. That is not because they love you, but they love your data and don’t want to lose that.
But even if you do delete all your social media accounts, that doesn’t get you off the grid because you may have a Google account and use that for Gmail or when you watch YouTube videos. You may use it to host photographs or when you use Google Maps or any of the other Google services. Deleting your Google account would remove all of your settings, preferences, purchases, and all your favoured sites.
Then, there’s the part that you cannot see: your internet usage creates traces and cookies that you leave behind as you browse the web, or stream video and audio with Netflix and Spotify. That’s just the tip of it. All of this may be anonymised and thus impossible to remove from those sites even if it is your right to do so.
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From RTÉ Brainstorm, why do some ads follow me around online?
Until October 2019, the Firefox web browser allowed you to see a visualisation of the websites you visit and all the third-party trackers active on those pages as you browsed them. Before it closed down, I used it to track my web browsing over the previous 11 months. I had visited 2,168 different websites, most of them more than once, and that browsing brought me to the attention of 10,197 third party web trackers. I can’t imagine the difficulty in getting myself removed from all those trackers.
However, if I was really concerned about this, there are ways to make your digital traces smaller by using internet services that do not track you. The best example of this is duckduckgo for internet searching, or Signal for messaging. both of which do not track your online activities.
While you can delete the parts of the internet that you created and that you own, you cannot delete the parts created by others. Even if you could, part of your past may already be archived for anyone to see, as it may be on the Internet Archive. This is a non-profit organisation which basically records the internet. It was launched publicly about 20 years ago and has material going back to 1997.
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From Internet Archive, how to use the Wayback Machine
It works by continuously downloading and storing web pages from web sites and making them publicly available. To use it, you input a web address into the WayBackMachine, wait a bit because it usually has to retrieve data from tape, and then it will show you a list of all the times it has copied and stored that web page. Click on a date and, voila, it shows you what that website looked like way back in the day.
The archive will visit and download popular websites more regularly than less popular websites. The RTE.ie website was first downloaded in 1996 and has been copied and saved over 15,700 times since then. The RTÉ Brainstorm web page was first saved in November 2017 and has been saved 372 times since then.
Apart from the public, the WayBackMachine's huge archive of more than 660 billion web pages from the past is used by scholars and journalists. A US appeals court has decreed that its content is legitimate evidence that may be used in litigation. It has also been cited as evidence a couple of hundred times in criminal cases in the US.
Disentangling yourself from the internet is a huge job
Even if you could delete yourself from the internet, you may already be on the Internet Archive. While you can remove yourself from there, it is yet more work for you if you are set on removing yourself from the internet.
In summary, disentangling yourself from the internet is a huge job. It is laboursome, tedious and exhausting - and not guaranteed to be complete. It is something that you really have to want to do if you are going to do it properly and you are going to need to dedicate a lot of time to do it even partially.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
