Are you tired of acquaintances knowing about what you were doing in college? Does it annoy you when employers uncover embarrassing things every time they Google your name? Perhaps you’re uncomfortable that virtually anyone can read about your life’s story with a single Google search? In need of some online privacy?
When you’re faced with this dilemma, it may be time to clean up your digital footprints or go covert on the internet. Thankfully, there are ways to remove any embarrassingly personal details you’ve left online.
Cleaning Up Your Digital Footprints
Retire old blogs and blog posts
You probably thought it was a good idea having your own virtual space for personal rants, diaries, and whatnot. Now that people are freely reading some of your old albeit embarrassing posts? Perhaps, not so much.
If you have an old Google Blogger account or a Tumblr or WordPress blog, you’ll have to get rid of those ASAP. Deleting them may permanently erase some precious memories, but you do have the option to save them offline. On the upside, all the comments and blog posts using those accounts will vanish altogether giving you online privacy.
Take yourself off search engines
Visit any of the major search engines and look up your name. Do this by putting your first name and surname inside quotation marks (“ “) so search engines will only look for that exact phrase. Afterward, hit the search button.
Take note of every site where your name explicitly appears and find out who’s the site administrator for each one. Get in touch with them so you can appeal to have your name removed from their website. Be prepared to be denied of your request, though. This is often the case when your name appears on virtual newspapers and magazines.
Remove any photos linked to you
Recall any photos you’ve uploaded on sites like Flickr and Google+. Remember your credentials, access your account, and manually remove those pictures.
Try searching for your name in Google Images, too. Again, put quotes (“ ”) around your name. See what comes up and determine if there’s a need to approach the sites where pictures linked to you show up. Cross your fingers that those sites will agree to have your photographs taken off their galleries.
Trace every forum where you’ve participated
Perhaps you may have posted a comment or two in forums back in the day. If that’s the case, retrace your steps and recall the forums where you used to hang out.
Sure, your comments back then weren’t incriminating or embarrassing. You may still have to see if you can delete them, though. That is if you don’t want strangers readily knowing your likes/dislikes or stance on things. As it turns out, it’s easy for anyone to find out about such personal information if you have been actively joining forum discussions online.
Look up yourself the Internet Archive
Serving as a repository of the Web, the site crawls the entire internet and stores whatever it sees forever. With that said, the Internet Archive could potentially store anything that may possibly link to you. That’s likely the case if you’ve posted anything outside Blogger, Facebook, or WordPress, though.
The bad news is that there isn’t an explicit way to remove websites that have been indexed in the Internet Archives’ massive database. They still, however, entertain requests for removal on a case-to-case basis.
Removing anything on the Web that explicitly mentions or tags your name will take a bit of work. Even if you’ve cleaned up most of your digital footprints, a determined online searcher could still dig up stuff from your past.
As a precautionary measure, keep these tricks in mind to stay effectively anonymous as you surf the Internet:
Tips on Protecting Your Online Privacy
Make your Facebook profile private
Keep whatever you’ve shared on social media within your circle of friends. Making any post or tweet public raises the risk of strangers sniffing out personal information you normally confide in the people closest to you.
Go to your account’s online Privacy options and change every setting to “private”, “not shared”, or “off”. You also need to check every photo you’re tagged in and untag yourself. The fewer the connections you theoretically have to the outside world, the better.
Find an alternative to Google
You may have to do your online research somewhere else when you don’t like Google constantly and silently tracking you. Besides these, doing so will ensure you won’t be carelessly leaving any more digital footprints on the web.
The good news is that there are plenty of other search engines that respect your online privacy better. Cases in point are search engines like Blekko.com and DuckDuckGo.com.
Forcefully removing yourself from the prying eyes of the Internet takes some work. It’s often a long, arduous process. Fortunately, the average person can always regain their digital dignity with the tips we’ve given.
