Wiping yourself from all searches, pages, and databases on the internet is time-consuming. It’s also likely impossible to clear every single digital footprint you’ve left online, but you can get close.
If you’re looking to minimize your online presence, here are some steps to take:
- Round up all your old emails.
- Delete Facebook.
- Delete all other social media and messaging apps.
- Close out all shopping, delivery, and travel accounts, apps, and platforms.
- Dig through old emails, delete forgotten accounts, and unsubscribe from any newsletters and services.
- Reach out to websites that feature your information, and scrub outdated information from Google caches.
- Check whether your emails and phone number have been compromised in data breaches and leaks.
- Send deletion requests to data collection agencies and brokers.
- Check internet archives like the Wayback Machine and send deletion requests.
- Delete your email accounts last.
There are also ways to be more anonymous online, if you want to take that route. Email providers like ProtonMail offer anonymity and privacy protection for communications, while a VPN can hide and change your IP address, so hackers or any other third parties can’t see your true location. A good VPN option is NordVPN:
We’ve compiled a full step-by-step guide on how to remove yourself from the internet. Read on to get started.
There are all kinds of reasons why you might want to scrub yourself from the internet and remove online information that belongs to you. If you’re looking for a job, you’d probably hate for a potential employer to pull up an embarrassing photo or long-forgotten and regrettable tweet. Some people need to cover their digital footprint to ward off cyberstalking, harassment, and other personal safety concerns.
Whether you fall into one of these categories or simply just want to remove information from the internet that is connected to you, you’ve also probably wondered about how to delete yourself from the internet entirely. While it’s nearly impossible to completely wipe out every single digital trace of yourself online, you can get pretty close.
Thinking about making a break for the exit door and getting off the grid for good? We’ve compiled a step-by-step guide on how to delete yourself from the internet altogether.
Remove Yourself From the Internet in 10 Steps
Before we get started, it’s important to note that this isn’t a process you can knock out overnight. Combing the internet and scrubbing yourself from its pages is going to be a time-consuming effort. Some online platforms won’t delete your account for a month or so, either.
Don’t be afraid to bookmark this article and come back to complete the steps as you go along. With that out of the way, here’s how to remove yourself from the internet.
1. Round up your old emails
From our experience, if you want to remove information from the internet, your first step should be digging up any old email addresses and recovering access to them. Since you’ll be canceling plenty of online accounts and connections, you’ll need those email addresses to do so.
How long have you been online? Do you remember the email you used to sign up for MySpace, Blogspot, or Tumblr? With those old email accounts, as well as the ones you’re currently using, you will be able to access all the websites, newsletters, and other online services you’ve signed up for over the years.
You’re going to need to get back into those accounts and clear yourself out. Plus, you’ll be able to see all the newsletters you’re subscribed to on old email addresses and wipe your name off those lists.
2. Start with Facebook
Facebook revolutionized data collection and targeted advertising. While they’ve certainly gotten into some hot water over the years for selling personal information (Cambridge Analytica scandal), there’s a more important reason to start here when you want to remove online information or a social media account. When you search for your name, your Facebook profile is usually one of the first things to pop up in Google search results. That’s why you’ll need to delete your Facebook account first.
But hold your horses! Before you get started, disconnect apps that use the “Login with Facebook” feature, like Spotify, TikTok, and DoorDash. If Facebook is your only way to log into these accounts, it might complicate things later. Here’s how you can disconnect them:
- Click on the “Settings” cogwheel on your Facebook page.
- Scroll down to “Apps and Websites.” This will show you all the third-party sites and apps you’re connected to via Facebook.
- Remove all connections and create usernames and passwords so you can log in to those other accounts later.
The accounts you find here will be useful to you in step 5 of this article, so make sure to keep a note of them! Once you’ve taken care of this, you can delete Facebook.
Step-by-step guide: Deleting Facebook
When you go into Facebook’s settings, make sure to “delete” your account and not just “disable” it. To completely delete your Facebook profile, you usually need to use the desktop browser version, not the app.
Here’s a quick step-by-step guide:
- In the top right corner of your Facebook, click on your profile picture.
- Select “Settings & privacy.”
- Click the “Settings” gear wheel.
- The window should open on Your Facebook Information, but if it doesn’t, click on “Your Facebook Information” in the top-left corner.
- Select “Managing Your Information.”
- You’ll have to fill out a form with details like your country of origin and your age. Once you’re done, pick “Deactivate or delete my account.”
- Click on “Send.” You might need to share your password to finalize the request. The deletion process should start now.
That’s all there is to it. Facebook won’t completely delete your online account for about 30 days in case you want to get back in. But after the 30 days are up, you’re officially off Facebook!
3. Close all messaging and social media accounts
Now that you’ve gone through the process on Facebook, you’ve got a playbook to do the same on every other social media outlet and remove information from the internet that belongs to you. Don’t forget dating apps, too. If you want your name, photos, posts, messages, and comments scrubbed from the internet, you’ve got to delete all your social media accounts.
Though we won’t run through the process of how to remove online information about you for each one individually here, we’ve written many instructional articles on how to close down accounts here at VPNOverview. The list below comprises the most common accounts you’ll need to delete, along with links to our guides.
- How to delete your Instagram
- How to deactivate or delete your LinkedIn
- Delete your Twitter account
- Permanently delete Reddit
- Remove your data from Snapchat forever
- How to delete your Tinder account
Don’t forget about your TikTok, WhatsApp, Skype, and your Facebook Messenger account if you have one. Of course, deleting all these accounts will be no easy feat, we know, and social media is just the tip of the iceberg.
According to the University of Illinois, the average American typically has between 70 and 150 online accounts that require a password. Just think about all the passing fads you signed up for when you were 15, and you’ll get a sense of the scope of this.
While you won’t need to delete every single one to get yourself offline, you will need to cut plenty. If there are any accounts you do want to hold on to, make sure to pay extra attention to step 7 in this article!
4. Remove information from shopping and e-commerce accounts
Though it might seem impossible to imagine life without Amazon, eBay, Etsy, or AliExpress, you’ll have to close those down as well and remove online information that belongs to you if you want to completely delete yourself from the internet.
E-commerce, online shopping, and delivery sites offer plenty of opportunities to review, leave comments, and send online messages. Even if you’re not an avid product reviewer, your profile and name are likely floating around somewhere on a long-forgotten post.
This also means Uber Eats and DoorDash will have to go. Are you into traveling? Don’t forget to get rid of your Airbnb, Expedia, and Booking.com accounts as well. The deletion process on those accounts should be very similar to that from step 2.
To help you remember some sites you might have an account on, here’s a list of some of the most popular shopping, food delivery, and travel websites people tend to have accounts on.
| Category | Websites |
|---|---|
| Shopping | AliExpress, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Craigslist |
| Food Delivery | Deliveroo, DoorDash, Grubhub, Uber Eats |
| Travel | Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, TripAdvisor |
5. Lose those forgotten accounts
When you’re going through your different email accounts, you can use the search function to target keywords like “Sign up,” “Membership,” or even just “Welcome.” This will show you emails received when you signed up for various services.
Using these emails, you can go directly through their official websites to cancel your old accounts or hunt down customer service agents and request they close you out. You might be shocked by all services and sites you’ve signed up for over the years, with many of them logging your activity and data.
You also may want to look into some of your old favorite sites too. MySpace, for example, is still active, with all the old social media accounts still there. If you plug in your old profile link, it’ll still be there. As we mentioned in step 2, digging through your Facebook-connected sites and apps is a great way to find forgotten accounts.
6. Scrub your outdated information from Google
Even after deleting accounts and cleaning house, there could still be various pages containing your information showing up on Google. There are a few ways to remove personal information from Google.
While Google has a special request form to remove information from the internet, like your personally identifiable information (PII), this is generally limited to pages containing sensitive data that could lead to identity theft, for example. This would include data like your Social Security Number, bank account information, login credentials, personal addresses, phone numbers, or even your signature (anything that can be used for identity theft).
The request form is helpful, but in most cases you’ll have to go to the source to scrub pages containing your basic information or photos. This might take some work. For example, let’s say you Google your name and find an old interview you did with your university a few years ago. It’s not threatening identity theft in any way, so Google won’t help. You’ll have to reach out to the university and request they remove the page themselves.
Even if they fulfill your request, your personal details can still show up on cached search engine results. Google regularly updates its cached or outdated search results. However, it could take a few days, weeks, or even months for the search engine’s algorithms to pick up on all the changes you’ve made.
If you want to fast-track the process, you can use the Google Search Console. For this, you’ll have to go through each page URL or image that shows up on the search engine and request an update. Once submitted and cleared, the results should vanish.
7. Check for your information in data leaks
If learning how to remove online information to disappear from the internet discouraged you, there are easier ways to protect your data online. You can check if any of your email accounts or phone numbers have been compromised in data breaches and leaks over the years. A great site for seeing how much of your information has been “pwned” (or compromised) is the site haveibeenpwned.com.
On this website, you can enter your email address or phone number and see if it’s been exposed during cyberattacks, data breaches, and leaks. If it has, you can make targeted adjustments instead of deleting everything. You can change or delete account names and passwords that might have been affected. Keep in mind that any accounts that aren’t included in your HaveIBeenPwned results, but do use the same usernames, emails, or passwords, might also be in danger.
As a general note, generating secure passwords regularly and enabling biometric logins is always good cybersecurity practice. And it’s especially important if you want to continue using the internet anonymously after you delete all your accounts.
8. Go after data broker sites and companies
Even after you’ve nuked your accounts, your information may linger in data broker databases. Third-party services can collect all kinds of information on you if you consent — including IP addresses, type of device used, browser used, and GPS tracking (for mobile), among other data. Companies aggregate that information and sell it to data brokers for marketing and advertising purposes.
Fortunately for EU residents, the privacy-conscious GDPR rules have made it easier to request that your data be deleted and remove information from the internet that belongs to you. The same goes for Brazilians with the LGPD and Canadians under the PIPEDA. Below are some more countries that have data protection laws similar to the GDPR.
| Country | Law |
|---|---|
| Argentina | Personal Data Protection Act |
| Bahrain | Personal Data Protection Law |
| Brazil | General Data Protection Law |
| Canada | Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) |
| Israel | Data Security Regulations |
| Japan | Act on the Protection of Personal Information (APPI) |
| Kenya | Data Protection Act |
| Mauritius | Data Protection Act |
| New Zealand | Privacy Act |
| Nigeria | Data Protection Regulations |
| Qatar | Law No. 13 |
| South Africa | Protection of Personal Information (POPI) Act |
| South Korea | Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) 2011 |
| Turkey | Law on Protection of Personal Data No. 6698 |
| Uganda | Data Protection and Privacy Act, 2019 |
| Uraguay | Act on the Protection of Personal Data and Habeas Data Action |
Though each nation has specific laws, DataBrokersWatch.org has pooled together the ten biggest international data brokers. This is as good a place as any to start. Just click on one of the brokers on the site, and it will lead you to forms for deletion requests. However, this can be a tedious process, so companies like Incogni can contact important data brokers on your behalf. Find out more about how they work in our Incogni review.
While residents living in California under the Consumer Privacy Act can send deletion requests simply enough, things work slightly differently in the rest of the United States. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has compiled a list of major data brokers in the US, including how (and if) you can opt out of their data collection.
Important Note:
There are well over 200 data collection groups in that database, so deleting your data may be a daunting task. Companies like Incogni don’t cover all data collection groups, but they come close enough for a relatively small fee.
9. Check the archives
There are projects and sites, such as the Wayback Machine, that collect, save, and archive public web content for future generations to study. While their intention probably never was to log and store your personal information online, they have likely done it one way or another since 2001, when their archives became publicly available.
If you’ve ever owned, operated, or published a website, its pages are likely logged on the site. Your old MySpace profile is probably on there as well. When we checked now-closed websites and old MySpace profiles, those appeared in searches on the Wayback Machine.
You can send requests by email to info@archive.org to have web pages removed, whether you own(ed) them or not. With old MySpace profiles, for example, you’d have to take this route.
To request takedowns of archived URLs and webpages that you own, you can also submit a DMCA takedown order, which is a copyright infringement notice. You can draw one up via the Copyrighted website and attach it to an email sent to info@archive.org.
10. Delete your email account
We saved this step for last because you’ll need your email accounts to remove information from the internet that belongs to you. Once you feel like you’ve successfully cleared yourself from online searches and services, you can finally close out your email account. If you want to erase yourself from the internet, you’ll need to delete your Gmail account, Yahoo Mail, or whichever provider you’re using.
Of course, if you think you can’t quite make that leap yet, you can instead change your privacy settings on your Google account to minimize what Google can collect about you. This goes for any and all accounts you decide to keep.
How to Remove Personal Information From the Internet Automatically
If just scanning this article made your head hurt, there are less time-consuming ways to remove yourself from the pages of the internet. Just like you might outsource that three-day plumbing job to someone who can knock it out of the park in a few hours, you can do the same for your internet presence.
Besides Incogni, you can use another provider we have extensively reviewed, DeleteMe, if you’re looking for a great service to remove personal information from the internet. This program was created to remove all of your personal information from Google, as well as data brokers. While it’s mostly automated, there’s also a human element to uproot your data from even the most steadfast and hidden collectors.
You’ll still want to delete private accounts yourself, but these services will certainly take care of cleaning those hard-to-reach places.
Life After You Remove Your Online Information: Browsing the Web Anonymously
It’s tough to imagine a life completely offline. How would you get your job done? Banking and investment apps have moved online, and a huge part of our money is electronic.
Unless you want to take a van out to the Alaskan wilderness and live off the land, you’ll probably still be interested in staying online, even if you want yourself removed from the internet pages as much as possible. This means that, in the future, you might want to take steps to protect your anonymity and privacy online. Here are the most important ones to get you started.
1. Get an anonymous email
We’ve always liked ProtonMail for sending anonymous emails. It’s one of the world’s largest secure email service providers and has more than a million active users. It was developed by a team of scientists and has become the leader in secure email services.
Of course, if you’re not so concerned with privacy and anonymity, you could always just create a burner Gmail account and Google Voice number for sign-ups and new memberships.
2. Avoid Big Tech browsers and search engines
Google and Chrome are wildly popular for a reason. They make life easier and faster. However, they also collect massive amounts of data on their users. Luckily, there are plenty of privacy-conscious browsers and search engines that will not record data such as your browser history.
Even though it’s mainstream and widely used, Mozilla Firefox can be set up as an anonymous browser. Meanwhile, Tor, Brave, and other browsers were designed to keep users’ privacy intact.
DuckDuckGo is the most commonly used alternative to Google for privacy-concerned web searchers. But we’ve also compiled a list of the best Google alternatives to give you more privacy-minded options to replace every Google service, from YouTube to Google Photos.
3. Always use a VPN
There are plenty of situations when a Virtual Private Network (VPN) comes in handy. For example, when you’re hooked up to insecure public Wi-Fi connections — as is the case in most coffee shops, airports, and hotels — your personal data is more or less up for grabs. It all depends on if hackers or other third-party snoops are around to take advantage of it or not.
Plus, if you want to stay anonymous, you’d want a VPN turned on at all times. This makes it impossible for the sites you visit to know (and store) your IP address.
A VPN creates a secure tunnel for you to browse in by swapping out and hiding your IP address and allowing you to connect through one of its secure servers instead. All the while, the VPN is encrypting your data with military-grade security protocols, so no one can decipher it.
In other words, using a VPN every time you go online will help you stay anonymous. In our testing, NordVPN came out on top of the competition. It’s reached the top of our reviews for its security features, fast speeds, and affordability.
Quitting the Internet: A Big Task
It’s certainly a hassle to cover all your digital tracks and remove information from the internet that belongs to you. Getting yourself erased from online indexes and search engines will eat up a lot of time, take a lot of work, and you probably won’t ever reach a perfect 100%. However, if you take the steps we’ve listed above, you should get pretty close.
It will also be difficult to stay offline completely these days, so it’s important to take steps to protect your privacy online after you’ve purged your online presence. Anonymous emails, browsers, and VPNs make the online experience much safer, more secure, and more private.
If you want to know more about how to enhance your online safety, check out the following articles:
- How to Browse the Internet Anonymously: Tips to Stay Private
- The Best Private Search Engines for Total Anonymity
- How to Call and Text Anonymously
Got questions about removing yourself from the internet? Click on any question below for an answer. Feel free to leave a question in the comments if you find there’s something we haven’t covered yet.
To remove yourself from the internet, take these steps:
- Delete all your accounts on social media, messaging apps, and shopping, delivery, and travel platforms.
- Scrub outdated information from Google caches.
- Send opt-out requests to data collection agencies and brokers.
- Delete your email accounts.
Want more details? Check out our full guide to deleting yourself from the internet to go through the process step-by-step.
To avoid being Googled, you’ve got to get yourself offline. Start with deleting social media apps and accounts, then move on to canceling other accounts and services that have public profiles. Check out our article on how to remove personal information from Google search results for a full explanation.
To remove personal information from the internet, you’ll need to start by deleting social media and messaging accounts, as well as all apps that make information publicly available, such as dating and e-commerce apps.
You’ll also need to send opt-out requests to data brokers and agencies. We’ve broken down how to delete yourself from the internet with a detailed step-by-step guide.
