Almost all people nowadays are connected to the internet. According to the Internet World Stats (2019), the number of people who were connected to the internet in 2019 is as many as 4.5 billion people. This is more than half of the world’s total population which was around 7.7 billion in 2018.
Knowing the fact that the internet is one of the crucial elements to everyone, we tend to enjoy the internet as much as they could and often are addicted to using it every day. Privacy is one of the big issues nowadays about the internet. People with an excellent understanding of the internet could extract the data that we inputted to the internet, and use our data to get some benefits out of the data they generate from social media.
The information which was submitted both accidentally or not accidentally could somehow become a serious problem for our future. For instance, assuming we have ever put some negative posts on a social in 2010. However, ten years after that, we applied to a tech firm and that tech firm could figure out the negative post on our social media. Another example, for instance, we do not bother to upload ourselves when we were in the night club and cussing at people because we were drunk. In that case, many of us will try to remove ourselves from the internet so that we will have a good reputation if someone tries to professionally find out about profile on the internet.
The question is, are we able to erase ourselves from the internet? The answer is No. We cannot remove ourselves completely from the internet. According to Ondrej Krehel, a Digital Forensics Lead, CEO & Founder of LIFARS says that we are in the era where everything that we touch, own, and interact with, is stored on the database. This data can be used, exchanged, and shared. In line with Krehel, Komando (2017) also says that we cannot remove ourselves completely from the digital world. Komando takes the court and government as an example. Where since the 1990s, these US government institutions have been posting public records into the internet including professional licenses, voter files, vehicle records, and soon.
However, we can minimize our footprint to be shown publicly especially throughout our social media. This will help us to organize what should be shown to the public and which one should be removed. You may try the following information to have your information hide from other people.
1. Deactivated Your Social Media
The easiest way to make ourselves disappear from the internet is by removing our social media. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Blogspot, and other social media that we think will not put as in advantage, we can start to remove them all.
In order to remove ourselves from social media, we can simply sign up from our social media account, go to the profile page, and click deactivate an account. However, if you think you have too many social media accounts to be manually removed, there is a website named accountkiller.com/ which could be a help for us to remove all of our social media within one process. Accountkiller also can be used to hide your data for those sites in which our account is difficult to be removed. For instance, Skype does not allow us to delete our account easily. However, Accountkiller could helo you to make some important information open only to you.
2. Remove Your E-mail Account
Removing your social media is not enough to get rid of the internet access to your profile. This is because most of the social media that we signed, we often use our email to sign up for that online portal. Therefore, our e-mail should save all of the information. Therefore, closing down our e-mail could be a perfect step to erase ourselves from the internet. This is important to avoid hacker go inside our email, and find out all data that we do want to be publicly shown.
3. Change Your Phone Number
Some online portal may ask you to provide your phone number to verify your account. However, this phone number is one of the valuable information that you gave them. Have you ever got advertised by various products that you think you have not communicated to them in any form of conversation or interaction? That one could happen because someone has stored and shared your phone number to anyone else. Burgess (2019) also suggests that if we want to secure our privacy, we should immediately change our phone number. According to him, hackers could use our phone number to log in to our social media which can be known as social media criminals.
As most of us concern with our data and privacy on the internet, I think those three steps mentioned above could be very helpful to avoid the misuse of our data. However, the process involved above does not guarantee your data will be 100% removed. Facebook, for instance, might tell you that your post has been deleted, thus people will not be able to see it, but it does not mean Facebook destroys the post or Facebook could not retrieve your post (Bohannon, 2017). Therefore, the best way to make yourself secure on the internet is either you are doing good on the internet, or avoiding to use any of it.
List of References:
- Bohannon, L. (2017, December 6). What happens when you delete a post from Facebook? Retrieved from Spartan News Room: https://news.jrn.msu.edu/2017/12/what-happens-when-you-delete-a-post-from-facebook/
- Burgess, M. (2019, March 7). Wired. Retrieved from If you want online privacy, change your phone number immediately: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/change-your-phone-number-online-privacy
- Internet World Stats. (2019, June 30). Worl Internet Usage and Population Statistics. Retrieved from https://www.internetworldstats.com/: https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
- Komando, K. (2017, June 23). How to delete yourself from the Internet. Retrieved from USA Today: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/komando/2017/06/23/how-to-delete-yourself-from-the-internet/102890400/
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Mashable. (2017, October 17). You Can’t Erase Yourself From the Internet. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru3_thOPXbA
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