Recently I have been disappearing from the Internet and I’m happy about it. You may think that is an odd comment from someone who derives their income from the Internet but there is a purpose. When using the Internet on a regular basis bits of information about us are usually left behind – these become our digital footprint. That one-off account sign-up, the latest social media fad, or that big blog idea that fizzled out after a month, all leave traces of us in cyberspace. When putting many of these fragmented, and often out of date, pieces of information together they form an odd picture so how can we remove these footprints and regain control?

That is the question that has driven my recent project to take back control and disappear from the Internet.

Your Digital Footprint Can Be Huge

Searching on the Internet and through emails I found I have left bits of me all over the place. Some of these are article ideas, social media activities, interesting but dated projects, and one off offers or research. As a result of signing up to accounts many of these sites send regular newsletters and updates through email which usually end up in the trash folder.

They are not all useless but the sheer amount of them has become too much and are causing really useful things to slip through the net.

Here are just some of the sites that have bits of me on them (in no particular order): Tumblr, Technorati, Facebook, Bambuser, Myspace, Digg, Delicious, Crunchbase, SlideShare,  BlogCatalog, LinkedIn, Wikio, Yahoo!, YouTube, ITAC, Virtual Academy, Pinterest, Alexa, Xing, Skype, Now TV, Blogcritics, LiveJournal, FriendFeed, DaniWeb, Origin, Netflix, Eventbrite, Alienware, AOL, Flickr, Zimbio, GoArticles, The People Pod, Squidoo, n0tice, WordPress.com, Here, O2, Outlook.com, Plesk, iMeasure, Bebo, Google+, Feedburner,  Coke Zone, YouGov, Money Dashboard, Blogspot, GoDaddy, ThemeForest, GitHub, Donut, Vine, Buzzfeed, Y8, SAP, SoundCloud, Quora, Wikia, Journalisted, Spotify, LoadStorm, EA, Awesomize.me, Feedage, Scribd,  Tesco, FeedBlitz, NorthPole, Miniclip, Kongregate, Waterstone’s, ONA, FGL, Woothemes, Alltop, Magix, Geocaching, BCS, LighterLife, Glitch, Klout, Quantcast, Corona Labs, Lulu, Nike, GoSquared, Journalist Directory, Foldit, Issuu, Triberr, Freelancer, Bbb, Blog, Ancestry, iPadio, SocialOomph, Jagex, Spiceworks, Ning, EzineArticles, PeerIndex, iMDB, Planet Source Code, Leapfrog, CreditExpert, Instagram, eBay, Vimeo, StumbleUpon, PreCentral, and the list goes on almost endlessly.

Some of the sites listed above are not used anymore, others rarely, and there are some which are still active and useful. For many of these sites once signed up public profiles and other content appear on most of them. These accounts need to be tidied up and cleared out as they are little more than digital dead-ends. However, when the lid is peeled back it can be really quite surprising, and just a little intimidating, just how much of you is out there.

There are a few methods for finding which sites you are still connected to:

• Search for “public profile” against your name
• Perform an image search and click through to the source web site
• Check your email history and look for “sign up”, “login”, “account”

Removing accounts from some services has been relatively painless whilst others are a real pain as they don’t offer account deletion functions.

For each site I have decided to be quite ruthless. If the site isn’t used regularly or no longer serves a useful purpose for me then it has to go. I am not sure how long it will take to catch them all as references to old, and often forgotten, accounts pop up on an almost daily basis which grows the list ever longer. Public profiles are becoming a real point of interest during this process – particularly as they present information and images from a particular point in time. Just looking at public profile photos can be quite a trip down memory lane.

Is It Even Possible To Disappear?

Once information is posted on the internet many things can happen to it which can make it difficult to get it removed. The small print on service sign ups usually gives the service provider rights to use your information for prolonged periods and the information, particularly email addresses, may even be sold on. I typically use a unique email address for each service I sign up for so it’s easy to trace when unsolicited SPAM emails start to arrive that have service provider references contained within them.

Other services simply will not allow account delete and will cite ‘legal reasons’ such as ‘hosting companies require accounts to be retained’.

In order to log my journey I do need to keep a few doors open so the last places of reference for me will likely be my blog and possibly Facebook or Twitter. The journey continues.