Posted 20 Feb 2011
How does one remove personal information from Internet websites?
Tattoo ink and internet ink are very similar. A lot of people are getting tattoos and putting their personal information on the internet. But, both tattoos and information on the internet are regrettably hard to remove. Even good ol' Mark Zuckerberg is finding out the hard way that making some personal information public might be a bad idea.
Whatever the popular trend is, there will always be some people who aren't fond of permanent identifying marks. But what can you do if you have made a few foolish mistakes in the past and you need to remove personal information from Internet websites? Fortunately, it is a lot less painful to remove personal information from Internet websites than it is to remove a Mike Tyson Special.
Removing private info from online profiles is an obvious first step, but there are a lot of websites that share or sell your data without your knowledge. There are ways to clean up a lot of that information too.
There are more websites that will share or sell your private data than anyone would like to count. A lot of the internet is just a big echo chamber. For every website with original content there are tons of other sites copying and repeating what was said before. If you want to take down information, focus on removing it from those sources. This narrows down your action to a few, rather than hundreds, of potential sources.
Intelius and Acxiom are two big data aggregators that are the biggest source for most other websites that share sensitive information on the internet. Removing your information from Intelius or Acxiom will effectively remove it from most other websites too. You may still want to remove personal information from Internet and other sites too, just to be on the safe side.
Most sites allow you to remove data like address, phone number, and social security number. Every company has a different method and you need to follow their own procedures. They might let you do it online, they might make you do it through the mail. Lots of times they will want you to provide more personal information to prove who you are to remove your information.
Here is a list of the main sites where your information might be found with a link to remove your info. You might want to check each one to see how much of your own personal information shows up.
Removing information from any of these sites, even Intelius or Acxiom, is like removing an unwanted tattoo. It is much better to avoid the tattoo in the first place than to try to remove it later. Plus, there are no guarantees that you can even remove it completely. The only way to do that is to know how your information gets in those databases in the first place, and prevent it from ever showing up there.
All of these websites collect your information from a lot of places like your online profiles (Facebook, linkedin, match.com, etc.) public records (property ownership records, court proceedings, census data, etc.) job application or resume sites, credit reporting agencies, smartphone apps, entering a sweepstakes to get free stuff, and lots of other sources that they won't even tell you about.
Data is valuable and most organizations that get it, sell it. Selling your information is what made Mark Zuckerberg a billionaire.
There are lots of ways to prevent information from ever showing up in these public sources, and from showing up online. The best way is to leave personal information blank whenever you are asked to provide it.
When you must share information, use a ghost address, pre-paid cell phones, a business entity, and other anonymizing techniques you can find in the book How To Vanish.
Another very useful thing you can do is to use a Virtual Private Network or TOR. This way any WIFI connections or your ISP are not able to keep logs of your Internet activity.
If you do use a VPN then never trust one unless they accept bitcoins because that severs the connection between you and your identity via a credit or debit card, etc. For these reasons we recommend Private Internet Access.
Like tattoo removal, removing personal information from the internet is not perfect. Traces of your personal information online may remain for a very long time. If you already have some unwanted informational tattoos, its not too late. The sooner you get started removing personal information from the internet, the better off you will be.
