Internet Quitters 2025: How to Say Farewell to Your Online Self, Once & for All

Are you tired of being watched? Google just updated its Results About You tool, and it’s an eye-opener. Tap in basic details and it will compile a dossier of web pages that display home addresses, past employers, phone numbers, email addresses, and more. If that doesn’t bother you, people have reported seeing their birth dates, grandparents’ first names, and children’s daycare locations.

For many it’s the last straw. Having personal info displayed for all to see puts you in the crosshairs for identity theft, deepfakes, and phishing attacks. For chief executives and celebrities the stakes are even higher.

Now new services are rolling out that, for a fee, will track, monitor, and request deletion for your personal info across the WWW – and beyond, even identifying data brokers that have your profile on file. We explain just how un-private your personal information is – and show you how to get it offline.

Table of Contents Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. How Big Is My Digital Footprint?
3. How Personal Data Spreads
4. A Gold Mine for Fraudsters
5. How Exposed Are You?
6. How to Become a Digital Ghost
7. Start at the Top
8. The Bottom Line
9. FAQs
10. References

Show Full Guide

Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. How Big Is My Digital Footprint?
3. How Personal Data Spreads
Show Full Guide
4. A Gold Mine for Fraudsters
5. How Exposed Are You?
6. How to Become a Digital Ghost
7. Start at the Top
8. The Bottom Line
9. FAQs
10. References

How Big Is My Digital Footprint?

Web forms, subscriptions, social media shares, chat groups, reddit posts … Once your personal data has been sucked into the interwebs’ gaping maw, can you ever get it out?

A 2020 study by Mine found that the average person’s data is held by 350 companies. To an average pleb like me that seems like a lot – what is it about my online doings that would interest so many firms? But for the top 5% of users with the largest digital footprints, it’s worse. Around 2,800 companies have access to their data.

Mine estimated that the figure would only rise, growing at an average rate of eight companies every month. Today, that would put the number at around 500.

What’s the reason? Often it’s benign. Data backups, log files, and standard email interactions can generate thousands of copies (‘instances’ in data management lingo) of your personal data.

But usually it’s deliberate and profit-driven.

Google and others keep loads of data about us in their memory banks, most of it free for the taking. Even letting your phone auto-connect to WiFi hotspots hands your unique IMEI number to the service provider, which they store and use to track your behavior at all the locations they serve.

How Personal Data Spreads

A Gold Mine for Fraudsters

That’s a lot of personal data held in a lot of places. Why care? Because easy access to your personal data makes you a target for junk mail, phishing scams, and identity theft.

Your data isn’t private, and it isn’t safe.

According to the US Identity Theft Research Center (ITRC), last year saw the second-highest number of data breaches since 2005. The agency issued more than 1.3 billion victim notices in 2024, most in response to five mega-hacks of personal data.

For executives, celebrities, government officials, and other people in the public eye, the stakes are even higher. Criminals can use subscription-based people-search services to find where they work, get their contact details, and target them for fraud or harassment.

Doxxing, or maliciously sharing the personal info of people you don’t like so they can be targeted for abuse, is also on the rise. A report by SafeHome estimates that around 11 million Americans have reported being victims of a doxxing attack.

How Exposed Are You?

Data brokers scrape public records, cross-reference them with data pulled from social media sites, then package their enriched personal profiles for hire. There are hundreds of such services, and though most have a process for opting out, the results can be sketchy.

That’s why you might want to get some help. New services are cropping up that will seek out your information on the internet and help you delete it. No one can scrub all your info from the web, but you can make it more difficult for frauds and marketers to pin a target on your back.

How to Become a Digital Ghost

There are two ways to minimize your online presence: DIY or automate.

If you prefer to do it alone, you can find a list of data brokerages and people search websites, then ask them one by one to remove your name and info. But be warned. It won’t be easy.

💡Just Delete Me💡A directory of direct links to delete your account from web services. It also shows you how difficult it is. pic.twitter.com/VKycQMqOFJ

— Dark Web Informer – Cyber Threat Intelligence (@DarkWebInformer) July 8, 2024

Most will have an ‘opt out’ process meant to delete your existing profile and block future data collection; however, every site has a different process. There are forms to fill in, and you may need to prove you are who you say you are, compelling you to hand over even more personal information in the process.

Still, it’s doable. Plan to spend at least a full weekend interacting with potentially hundreds of websites and navigating multiple removal processes.

Automation is the easier way to go. Services like Mine, Optery, or DeleteMe will do the legwork for you. For a fee, they’ll scour the internet for your information, give you a report listing all the locations holding your data, and then get to work scrubbing it out. They’ll also run checks every few months to ensure your profile hasn’t been added back.

It can take up to a week for these services to compile the first report. Some will show you the current opt-out status and give you an estimated time for removal from each data broker. It can take as little as 24 hours or up to six weeks.

Start at the Top

Regardless of which route you take, it makes sense to start with Google. Along with search histories and emails, the web’s supreme data collector can hold everything from map locations to voice recordings and details about your actual movements on a given day, all thanks to GPS and other tracking tools embedded in Android.

Visit http://myactivity.google.com and toggle off the options for saving web activity, timeline, and YouTube viewing history. Then use the ‘delete’ button on the right-hand side to clear out what’s already there. Google, to its credit, has made this process surprisingly easy – and fast. Deletion takes place immediately.

Next, go to Google’s enhanced Results About You page. It detects search results that contain personal information like addresses and phone numbers. Once you sign in and enter a few top-line contact details like name and email address, you can start to make removal requests directly from the Search page.

The Bottom Line

Can you really get off and stay off? There are processes baked-in to server and data storage infrastructure that make it hard to become a digital ghost. Sometimes databases need to be restored from backups and that can bring previously ‘deleted’ data back online.

Archived web pages get re-published. Sites will say they’ve deleted your data, but then don’t – or they simply remove it from public view while storing it offline for secret sale or rental.

They say the internet never forgets, but a study by the Pew Research Center found that almost 40% of the web pages that existed in 2013 have disappeared entirely. In an era of digital decay, eventually we’ll all be deleted.

FAQs