How Do I Disappear From the Internet?

[justin-brock]

Almost everything we talk about here involves making our content, or ourselves, more findable. However, a few years ago someone asked me this question: "How do I disappear from the internet?"

She had a blog, a Facebook account, and some miscellaneous community engagement. Perhaps she was had witnessed a murder by a mafia hit man. Maybe she had an ex-boyfriend who was stalking her. She could have been going overseas as a spy. Or maybe she was in trouble with the law. Or she could have just been looking for a job but fearful of the content from her college years.

Whatever it was she wanted to disappear from the web ... to go off the grid.

Here was my advice:

• Export the blog content and delete the blog.
• If you don't delete the blog, hide it with robots.txt, put it behind a login, and put a meta noindex, nofollow, noarchive, noodp tag on all the pages.
• Export your Facebook account and delete it.
• Find all the forums and sites you posted to. See if you can delete your posts and profile. Or at least change your name and other profile content. Then maybe delete the email accounts you used for those profiles.
• Set up Google alerts with your name or specific phrases from your profile.

I saw a news article today that reminded me of her question and made me wonder what I missed, if anything.

In my college art classes, we would sometimes draw the area surrounding the subject - the negative space - rather than draw the actual subject. This question is like that. What does un-findability look like? Maybe that will bring out some insights on optimization we haven't thought of.

So if it were you, how would you go about disappearing from the internet given your current level of engagement online? Maybe it would be helpful to imagine yourself in a witness protection scenario.

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[danwebman]

The only thing I would say is that the Google alerts would have to be set up using a fake email account!

Interesting scenario. Luckily I have a Sculpture who hides me from the internet!