Learn me : Removing ALL my personal information from the interwebs!

There’s so many Robert millers and most are dead. 

In reply to Streetwiseguy :

My friend got a massive fine for a ticket left unpaid in Colorado.

Hes never been to Colorado.

I share a name with a B-List actor so Googling just nets you thousands of hits for him. I have no social media anywhere except for here and I do my best to not give up my personal information as much as possible 

californiamilleghia said:

Anyone here from Europe that has the new data protection laws ?

It would be interesting to know if that allows removing yourself and your info from certain websites, 

I'm not "from" Europe, but I'm currently in Europe... at least for a couple of years.

GDPR has been interesting to interface with.  A lot of US websites will either not resolve, auto advance to a "our legal department is considering GDPR" doc, or will have a popup screen that will force you to opt-in, or sometimes give you the option of opting-in to only "cookies required for functioning".  If you surf incognito, then you end up going through these selections every time.

and then there's Brexit... which has Google scrambling to server locations, from what I can tell.

and then there's this Article 13 thing... which YouTube is advertising against frequently, and which may or may not pass.

So does the GDPR allow you to remove info about yourself ?

Or have access to see what it is ?

And just because you are in the EU  does it give you the same rights as an EU citizen ?

This podcast episode has some good information about what is out there, and what you can do to protect yourself. Reply All Episode #130

californiamilleghia said:

So does the GDPR allow you to remove info about yourself ?

Or have access to see what it is ?

And just because you are in the EU  does it give you the same rights as an EU citizen ?

No, I do not have the same rights as an EU citizen... I'm only a 'temporary resident' here.

I think most of the website behaviors I've seen are primarily due to geo-location IP lookups.  Can you find what data websites have?  Yes, it looks like... but for any of the big sites, they're going to force you to go dig into cookies/privacy policies of each of the partner sites that they have running in their site.  In fact, some of the sites, if you click "change my options" it will drop you into a new page with dialogue outlining their partner sites and giving you links out to them to "set your preferences", and then if you drill down into the partner sites sometimes you'll find that you have to send them *physical mail* requesting that you remove their tracking you... which seems like it defeats the purpose.

So basically, yes you can do the things... but you're going to have to jump through many hoops to do so... and potentially end up sending them more data about yourself than you wanted to in the first place.

standard caveats: I'm not a lawyer, nor an IT person, ymmv, caveat emptor, back up your data, etc etc

edit: this is a pretty standard for a number of 'smaller us digital media companies':

sometimes they even allude to "our lawyers are looking it over for the time being"

both of which is a load of E36 M3

If people want to associate me with a 70's martial arts film producer, I'm ok with it. 

I'm a huge fan of using Ghostery when online to block as much random info sharing as possible. 

SVreX said:

In reply to Streetwiseguy :

The first hit on my name is a guy in England who was convicted of raping a 13 year old girl.  Count yourself lucky. 

I knew a guy who had the same first name, middle initial, last name and date of birth as a registered sex offender in the State of Michigan. It made crossing the US-Canada border interesting. . . . . . . . . . . . 

tjbell said:

Well, I am trying to remove all my personal information from the interweb. Read about a site called "Deleteme" and figured someone here knows more about this than me.

Kinda scary I can find my address, and family members fairly easily.

Get a new computer, get a new ISP, use all new e-mail addresses, do not use Facebook, Google services, or any major forums with your old screennames.  Learn to adopt new writing styles and "tics".  Leave all of your old online friends behind.  Communicate with your family only in person.  NEVER GET PHOTOGRAPHED.

You can't erase the existing damage, only mitigate future damage.

93gsxturbo said:

SVreX said:

How about attempting the opposite?

I wonder... could you flood the databases with enough garbage data about yourself that it basically became impossible to figure out what was true about you?

Hmm....

All the Mike Smiths of the world already have this going for them.  And in 15 years, the Braydens, Aidens, Kaydens, etc of the world will be right there with them.  

There are fewer than 70 people with my surname in the world, and only one with my first name.  Man, I'd hate to be that guy!

Knurled. said:

tjbell said:

Well, I am trying to remove all my personal information from the interweb. Read about a site called "Deleteme" and figured someone here knows more about this than me.

Kinda scary I can find my address, and family members fairly easily.

Get a new computer, get a new ISP, use all new e-mail addresses, do not use Facebook, Google services, or any major forums with your old screennames.  Learn to adopt new writing styles and "tics".  Leave all of your old online friends behind.  Communicate with your family only in person.  NEVER GET PHOTOGRAPHED.

 

You can't erase the existing damage, only mitigate future damage.

Just to elaborate...

Last week or month or something, I was surfing YouTube (do people still say "surfing"?) and I had a video "recommended for me".  It was something that I'd last watched one ISP and two computers ago, and I never log in to any Google services on this computer, and it wasn't anything remotely related to anything I'd watched lately.

Brrrrrrr.

1. Once its online, it has been archived somewhere. Its not going away, but can become obscure. Your data can be removed in some cases by contacting the site. In most cases the data will remain, but be unpublished. Sites like archive.org are pretty prolific, so check there too.

2. Poison the well. Publish fake info with your name. Attend far away schools in your profile. Avoid anything fishy, just lots of probable bs. Find others with your name and confuse the two. Basically, bury good info with bad. 

3. Companies that claim to 'erase you from the internet' are 99% fraudulent/useless. If you actually need a reputation management firm, hire one. Many are quite capable, but spendy to mere mortals. 

4. There is some speculation that creative abuse of the new EU right-to-be-forgotten laws may be possible, but I have not seen it applied yet. This technically applies only to EU citizens, but many companies are unlikely to verify your national status if given an EU address. 

5. The obvious lesson here is to only put online what you are sure you want public forever. This includes 'private' messages, and messages on 3rd party services and apps. Posting online is the same as publishing in a newspaper. Public. Forever. 

I’m already dealing with other people with my name. Locally, one was writing bad checks at gas stations, another is the lawn guy my friends use, and a third works for the same company, same department, just a different location about 50 miles away. On occasions I think about continuing my photography, I remember there is a kind of famous celebrity photographer with the same name as well. 

RossD said:

tjbell said:

Well, I am trying to remove all my personal information from the interweb. Read about a site called "Deleteme" and figured someone here knows more about this than me.

Kinda scary I can find my address, and family members fairly easily.

There used to be this book, where they would publish everyone's name, phone number, and address. Everyone died, and had everything stolen, if I remember correctly.

I have a fairly uncommon last name, but a Google search generally just brings up some recent car events, donations and bike racing results.