Can you wipe yourself off the web?

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In a word, no. Consumer reports released a report about personal removal services. They note ” Manual opt-outs were more effective than people-search
[See the full post at: Can you wipe yourself off the web?]

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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abbodi86, lmacri, Alex5723

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I know well someone who has done so. I asked them one day about why I couldn’t find the usual traces I use for phones, e-mail, and pro sites. They replied that they knew some people.

Human, who sports only naturally-occurring DNA ~ oneironaut ~ broadcaster

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How to Remove Your Personal Information From the Internet

Deleting your data from a public search database doesn’t make it inaccessible—just less easy to access.

This guide covers how to remove your personal and public records information from the following databases: Radaris, USA People Search, Whitepages, 411.com, PublicRecordsNOW, Private Eye, PeopleFinders, Intelius, Zabasearch, AnyWho, TruthFinder, Instant Checkmate, US Search, PeekYou, BeenVerified, PeopleSmart, PeopleLooker, Spokeo, FastPeopleSearch, Nuwber, FamilyTreeNow.com, TruePeopleSearch, ThatsThem, Spy Dialer, CocoFinder, PeopleFinderFree, Pipl, Truecaller, ClustrMaps, NumLookup, peopleWhiz, MyLife, and Hunter…

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I recently signed up for a removal service as an experiment. Several things to know if you are thinking about such services:

1. These services attempt to remove ones info from “online search databases” which  typically simply aggregate public records about you. The services do not do anything to eliminate ones data from “data brokers“, i.e., those companies that gather your online activities via trackers, fingerprinting, purchasing histories, apps, etc., profile you and then sell your data to advertisers, governmental entities, businesses and other data brokers.
2. The removal services often advertise as if they remove your data from these more seriously privacy-invading data brokers. They don’t.
3. Some of the online search databases that they do attempt to remove your data from will not cooperate. Your data will remain.
4. Depending on your State of residence, most online search databases can and will place your info back up again after typically one year or so. This means that the removal service will have to make a request again to remove you.
5. Since this will lead to a continual clean-up cycle, you are basically signing up for an ongoing, never-ending subscription if you want to keep yourself wiped from most online search databases.

If the subscription is worth not having to undertake this never-ending task yourself, go for it. Personally, I will likely cancel my subscription. It’s the “data brokers” I’m most concerned about and without strong State or Federal laws to control the online data/surveillance economy, I believe these removal services are mostly just a Band-aid on a major wound.

Win10 Pro x64 22H2, Win10 Home 22H2, Linux Mint + a cat with 'tortitude'.

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Still Anonymous, SueW, Lars220, Douglas

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In the early pre-dawn days of the Internet (before it was called that) I was a member of a Usenet discussion group rec.arts.***

Of course, in those days, we didn’t have to worry too much about leaving your personal information out there, or about doxing. So way back when, my signature included my physical street address.

Now, 30+ years later, I ran a Google privacy check and discovered that the full archive of those rec.arts.* groups has been ingested into Google Groups, and there, all these decades later, is my personal address. Now, it turns out, this was my teenage to college home, and these days I have, after some globetrotting and living overseas, returned to living back in the same address from all those years ago after my mother retired to aged care.

Naturally, in today’s environment of datamining etc, that is not ideal. But, while Google was quite happy to point out to me that my personally identifiable information is out there ON ONE OF ITS MANAGED SERVICES, they were also unwilling to scrub my address from those entries. Nice one. <sigh> The internet never forgets…

No matter where you go, there you are.

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Lars220, Steve, Still Anonymous

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I use the free  Google ” Results About You.”   It cleans some of it up.                                      https://myactivity.google.com/results-about-you

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Lars220, windbg

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Geo wrote:

I use the free  Google ” Results About You.”   It cleans some of it up.                                      https://myactivity.google.com/results-about-you

Yes, that was the one I used, but apparently it doesn’t work for ingested groups like this.

No matter where you go, there you are.

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Some of the information is entirely public — in the US, if you own a home, the ownership information is easily obtainable in most jurisdictions from the local county recorder’s office. It’s really easy to see who’s scraping that information, from the amounts of junk mail that I get that is addressed to the entity that is the registered owner.

In the early 2000’s, after I got a new phone number, I spent several months getting harrassing calls from what were apparently debt collectors looking for the previous owner of my phone number. Then again, a few years ago (and nearly 20 years later) I got a new batch of calls for the same person, where that phone number was scraped from old records.

Unfortunately, as with email addresses and spam, once somebody has that information and thinks they can monetize that, they will. Trying to delete that stuff may be momentarily satisfying, but the critters keep coming back. And now a new for-profit vector, the operators that promise (for a fee) to get you removed.

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Lars220, Steve

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