How to Disappear from the Internet: Lessons from the Attempt

Internet privacy can feel overwhelming. Between breaches , data brokers , old accounts , and the complexity of social media privacy controls, even figuring out where your data is can be a challenge. If you’re concerned about privacy, learning how to disappear from the internet altogether may seem like a good idea. Unfortunately, it’s not so easy in reality. But taking small, intentional steps can go a long way. See Vanishing is a Lie with Max Eddy for a complete transcript of the Easy Prey podcast episode. Max Eddy is a senior staff writer at Wirecutter covering privacy, security, and software. He experiments with security and privacy services and software programs, as well as investigating software platforms. Then he writes reviews for Wirecutter to help people better understand what works best for them. Journalists tend to get on a particular beat and stay there, and Max is happy to stick with privacy and security. It’s confusing stuff. He’s the kind of person who doesn’t mind trying dozens of different VPNs until he finds a good one. He feels like the work he does is an opportunity to make people’s lives a little bit better and meet a lot of needs. The Wirecutter team recently had a conversation about new ways to reach audiences and answer their big questions about privacy and security – maybe questions they didn’t realize they had. The result was a package of stories on data privacy written by Max and fellow Wirecutter journalists. They include topics like smart devices spying on you and what happens to the online presence of someone who dies . One in particular follows Max’s attempt to figure out how to disappear from the internet. It’s a lot of important stuff to help people figure it out before something happens. A lot of the stories boil down to taking small steps in advance. A lot of these stories always boil down to … you should probably do these two to three important security and privacy things that will make your life a little better. Use a password manager . Turn on two-factor authentication (2FA). Don’t make all your social media accounts public. Even just doing these small things can have a surprisingly big impact. If Max could make one change in the world, he would have everyone use a password manager and 2FA. That would make everyone’s life much better and safer. If I could wave a wand and change one thing … it would be everyone use a password manager and 2FA. Max came at the experiment with a slight advantage. He already used a password manager so he had a record of every site he had an account at. He had over 350 accounts. That was way too many to do in a reasonable timeframe, and definitely not by his article deadline. So he used the service Have I Been Pwned to get a list of compromised accounts. From there, he added a few more accounts that hadn’t been exposed, but that had a lot of information or that people would be interested in, like Facebook. The final list for his experiment had 55 sites. Max was not the first person to try this kind of experiment. And he’d learned from his years talking to experts as a journalist that you just can’t disappear from the internet. It doesn’t work. So he went into this experiment knowing he probably couldn’t try to disappear. Instead of trying to delete everything, he decided to build a framework to take control of his information. It is a fantasy to believe that you can disappear from the internet. Rather than delete accounts, Max decided to instead remove his personal information and separate the accounts from each other. He replaced his real name with a fake, deleted any bio information or replaced it with nonsense text, and replaced all photos with random images from a bitmap generator. He used an email masking tool to create a unique email address for each account. Scammers and marketers are really good at taking information from lots of places and drawing connections to get a lot of details about a person. Doing all this broke apart the accounts and make it harder for someone to connect the accounts together and find Max specifically in that mess. Max had been looking at data broker removal services for a while. He was interested in seeing how well they work, both personally and professionally. Some of those questions are ones he’s still trying to answer. Wirecutter currently has a long-term experiment going to test how well they perform over time. But for his attempt to disappear from the internet, Max signed up for about a dozen services. This is overkill for the average person, but he wanted a good sample. You don’t need to pay a service to do this. You can go online, find your info at data broker sites, and request it be removed. It’s free if you want to invest the time and effort. A service just makes it easy. Put in your information once, and they’ll track it down and request the removal for you. They’re also much better at finding some of the more hidden data brokers – some hide their search results from search engines so it’s harder for you to request it. In the end, the important thing is that you just try to do something about it. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of data broker services. And each data broker removal service is better with slightly different selections of them. But the important thing is to just do something. From the short term, it’s clear to Max that something happened. His info started to disappear. The more services he used, the less he found his information. He had a hard time figuring out how each individual service made a dent, but it’s pretty clear that making any effort is valuable. Making any kind of effort with removing your personal information from the internet will make a difference. Public records are a common source of personal information. Anecdotally, Max had heard that a lot of data brokers get info there. And he discovered that there wasn’t a lot he could do. How much you can do with public records depends on where you live. But he wasn’t able to change or hide real estate records, voter registration records, or lists of donations to political organizations. The last one was an especially fruitful source of information – depending on how he pulled it, he could get his own home address, phone number, and more. While he was doing his disappearing from the internet experiment, some people asked him why he didn’t put real estate in an LLC. First of all, he wasn’t going to buy a house for the purposes of writing an article. And second, nobody could say whether or not it would actually hide information. Even if it did, it might not be useful. The real estate records would still show you as a previous owner, and just because you sold it to an LLC didn’t mean you moved. The most interesting thing about looking through public records was how it put Max in the data brokers’ shoes. A lot of databases give information, but you have to sort through it yourself. If you’re careful, you can put together smaller pieces of information to help filter bigger databases. Max could do it for himself easily, because he knew what was true. If he was doing it for a stranger’s data, it would be much harder. There’s another Max Eddy who lives in the same state, though nowhere near Max.  Without context, it would be really easy to mix up the two. Social media services don’t make it easy to remove your data. Facebook does have some tools to make it easier, but those tools are difficult to use. While poking around in the Facebook menu options, Max tried to take notes of what he was doing. And though he did find options to make all posts private retroactively and see every interaction you’ve ever done on the site, they were buried so deep in menus that even his notes couldn’t help him find them again. The most surprising thing for Max about the social media component of disappearing from the internet was the sadness of removing the information. In a way, going through everything and deciding what to get rid of felt like deleting his own history. He ultimately decided to leave his Foursquare account up – not just because it was hard to remove, but because it felt wrong to delete it. Max ended up making copies of a lot of his stuff before it was deleted, even his embarrassing Livejournal posts. It felt like part of his own history and he wasn’t willing to give it up. For anyone out there who is having some angst about [deleting social media], it is actually easier to do than you might think and in some ways, very freeing. There are tools out there that can make this easier. Max used Cyd to automatically remove all tweets, retweets, and likes from Twitter, and it cleared several hundred thousand tweets in about three hours. He used the Automator app on Macintosh to write a simple program to delete everything from Instagram. It was about 70% effective at deleting things, but it didn’t save him from the emotional toll of watching his memories flash by and be deleted. At first, Max was afraid to ask friends and family members to remove photos of him. But once he started, he was surprised to find many people saying they had a very different relationship with social media than they used to. They didn’t trust the platforms in many ways and were happy to remove his photos. For all its faults, though, social media is a default way of communication for many people. Max’s family communicates almost exclusively over Facebook and Facebook Messenger. If Max were to entirely delete his account, he’d be cutting himself off from talking to them. Everyone has to make individual decisions about how to handle these things. For Max, he chose to remove as much of his information as Facebook would let him, but left his account still there. For a journalist, your name and what work it’s associated with is what gets you work. Trying to entirely disappear from the internet would be bad for Max’s career. So he quickly decided not to ask previous employers to remove his name from articles. But for other people in different careers, that might not be a bad idea. Everyone needs to make that determination for themselves. There’s also the risk of impersonation. If you have an account on a platform that has been around for a while, it’s easier to prove you’re you. And you don’t have to be a public figure to be impersonated. Max has seen scammers impersonate one of his own family members, a regular person in a regular job in middle America, and try to trick family members into sending money. It’s a strange position to be in where it can be safer to have a profile so people are less likely to run into the wrong one. Having that account doesn’t mean you’ll never be impersonated. But it does make it easier to handle if it does happen. Just because you are not a known individual and your’e not easily googleable does not mean that someone will not try to pretend to be you. Max’s goal was to see how far he could disappear from the internet with his info-removing framework. He thinks it’s pretty actionable, and hopes to someday go through all 350+ of his accounts. If you want to do something similar, he recommends starting the same way he recommends starting with a password manager: Doing it as you go. Every time you log into a site, record it in your password manager – or go through the account and remove your data. Since doing this experiment, Max has become a lot more conscious of what information he gives out when he signs up for things. In some ways, it’s made him more comfortable giving out some info. His phone number is already out there, and there’s not much he can do about that, so he’s not afraid to give that out anymore. He rarely picks up the phone if he doesn’t recognize the number, anyway. But he’s much more cautious giving out his real email address. He also spends more time looking at ways to fake information that an online service asks for so he’s not giving out his real data. A lot of this is individual. What do you feel comfortable giving out, and what do you want to keep private? Answering that will inform how you move forward. A lot of this is going to be individualized. What do you feel comfortable giving away and what don’t you feel comfortable giving away? If you’re looking at how you can disappear from the internet, the short answer is you can’t. It’s impossible to completely remove yourself from the internet. But if you have that desire, Max encourages you to ask yourself two questions: Also remember that any effort you make is beneficial. If you use a password manager even a little bit, it will make you safer. If you try to remove your data from data broker services, even if you just do a couple, it will keep your info more private. There’s no way to do everything. But doing even a little helps. Find Max Eddy online on Mastodon @maxeddy on the infosec.exchange server . You can also find his work on Wirecutter .