There is no denying that doing this is much harder than it looks as a written statement. In the digital age, removing all of your information from online websites, especially those in the niche of social media, can happen to be very difficult and even frustrating.
The one thing where a lot of people are making mistakes when entering the online world is that they don’t read the Terms of Service (ToS). Facebook clearly states how much of your information is going to get shared with the whole world, although it offers a couple of security options to prevent this, it’s still gonna be very hard to completely wipe yourself from the internet.
I remember a couple of years ago I made a great choice of making an pseudonym for one of my websites and I never bothered to change it to my real details, it later turned out that it was for my own good as there were some things happening to my website which I would rather not disclose, that could have hurt my reputation a little bit.
You will have to start with the basic social media websites, as those usually store the most information about you, and also happen to be the most annoying to get rid off. A website called “Just Delete Me” will also give you a lot of good pointers, it will explain the basic requirements for removing your information from a specific sites. It currently features pretty much all the big and public online sites you might use.
For other sites, I suggest you simply follow the basic etiquette for deleting data. If a “delete” button is not present on your account, simply contact the websites administration with a request of account removal. As far as I know that is nothing that should ring any alarm bells, and makes sense as a request.
Whatever the reason for you deciding to quit, and wipe all your publicly available information from the web, I can only wish you best of luck in doing so. Remember that it’s going to take a little while before Google forgets about you.
