Delete Digital Footprint to Protect Confidential Data (14 Ways)
The digital traces you leave behind could determine various facets of your life such as the aspects of education, jobs, and other prospects in your life. Therefore, the best way to counteract possible threats is through a reduction of online presence. The possible methods to do so are deleting inactive accounts, carefully sharing your online info, and utilizing a password manager to limit access to your social media pages. Moreover, gaining insights from the web on the ways to delete digital footprint. Let’s find out the underlying reasons and associated solutions.
What is a Digital Footprint?
“Your data isn’t just numbers—it’s your life. Protect it before someone else makes it public.”
Digital footprint is nothing but the trail of information that you leave behind when you surf over the internet. It contains things like your search history, online reviews, photos or videos you upload, and your newsletter subscriptions. In general, your digital footprint is created in two possible formats i.e. Active and Passive.
- Active digital footprint: When you willfully disclose certain information through the internet, say through social networks or enabling cookies on your phone.
- Passive digital footprint: On the other hand, this is the process of gathering data without someone being aware of it; for instance in case someone has an IP address or location recorded by some website.
As all individuals who log into a computer leave behind some form of digital footprint, taking care of the information shared is one way of protecting yourself from privacy invasions.
Is it Possible to Completely Delete Digital Footprint?
The answer to this question – is not clear. It is because you may somehow fully erase your online presence, but what about the server side to delete digital footprint – you don’t know about the other side’s data? If you are spending most of your time online and are active on most social media platforms. Then, your personal information is just a click away to access. With just your name, one can sneak into hidden personal treasures using search engines, social networks, and dedicated data brokers.
Despite making it easier for people to access their personal details; it exposes them and becomes a source of wealth for identity thieves, hackers, and even scammers. It’s no wonder that:
84% of internet users are seriously concerned about what could be revealed in their digital footprints.
Case Study –
Here, I would like to share the profound story of a Tinder user (Her Shocking Reveal):
Duportail used European regulations to request all the data the dating app Tinder had collected on her. The company’s response will terrify you:
By reading all 1,700 Tinder messages I’ve written since 2013, I took a journey through my desires, fears, sexual inclinations as well as my best-kept secrets. They (messages) say that Tinder understands me better than anyone else does. It knows the true version of me who copy-pasted the same joke to hit numbers 567, 568, and 569, and who once chatted with 16 people at once on New Year’s Day, only to ghost all of them afterward.”
Hence, not to end in a similar fate, you can erase digital footprint to minimize or protect yourself in the future about privacy and safety.
Reasons to Delete Digital Footprint From Internet
It is important to consider the effect of digital footprint. Here are compelling reasons to erase digital footprint:
- Privacy Protection- Anyone (marketers & hackers) can use digital footprints to collect personal data. Therefore, removing your digital traces can prevent you from unauthorized access to your data.
- Reduce Online Tracking- Various organizations track your online activity to serve products or ads. By erasing your digital footprint, you can reduce the amount of data acquired about you to minimize unwanted tracking.
- Prevent Identity Theft- Cybercriminals can use the information available about you which are available online to commit fraud and other malicious activities by reducing their online presence decrease the risk of identity.
- Clean Up Your Online Image- Your personal and professional life may be impacted by previously published content and images that appear online. By deleting those images, it can help you keep a good internet reputation.
How to Find Digital Footprint?
Before going to the main context i.e. how to delete digital footprint? Let’s first witness responses on how to find them. As digital footprint data can be difficult to get access to, it is not always easy to tell how much information is available online. Here, are a few ways using which you discover your digital identity:
1. Search Yourself Online
Start through the search for your name on Google. If you discover meticulously and thoroughly, you will be able to find the domains and internet directories, social media accounts, and other venues where your information is shown.
If you have a common name (or one similar to a celebrity or someone with a larger footprint), add your city or career following your name with a “+”. For instance: “John Smith + Columbus Ohio.”
2. Use Google to collect your information
Google provides users with a service that helps them find out where their personal information is available online. You only need to fill out the form and let the search engine collect all your information on its own accord.
3. Data brokers should be questioned
There are businesses called data brokers who go through public data and then sell it to advertisers among others. Most of these data brokers will give you everything they have about you once requested (and in some cases, they might be required by data protection regulations).
Nonetheless, often it may not be so smooth sailing. This is where you need services such as Aura who provide automatic ways of opting out from data brokers to discover who knows something about you and make them delete it for you.
4. Conduct a free scan of the Dark Web
Your online trail could contain private information that was revealed in well-publicized security breaches or sold on the Dark Net by cybercriminals. By using an online dark web scan at no cost, one can learn about all personal specifics that hackers know regarding them and those that are associated with only their email addresses.
How To Delete Digital Footprint (14 Ways)
There are a total of 14 methods to remove digital footprints to protect your privacy.
1. Review Activities on Public Wi-Fi
It is essential to understand that your internet connection can be monitored when using free Wi-Fi in many locations such as cafes, hotels, and airports. The information these Wi-Fi operators could collect may include sites accessed along with their respective times of access. These records are collected for different reasons like network management or advertisement purposes.
Consequently, it is advisable to adopt measures aimed at safeguarding one’s privacy during the use of such networks like using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to encrypt his/her connection and certain browsing habits to limit the chances of losing data or falling into the hands of unauthorized users.
2. Delete or Deactivate Unused Accounts
Make or Check a note of all the online accounts present on the internet and remove any that you no longer require or use. Email addresses, online shopping accounts, and social media accounts are mainly included. The majority of online websites have the option to remove or cancel your account under the setting option.
3. Remove Personal Information from Websites
About Image- In various year these companies breach the data of their user but they reclaimed it very few percent so it is very important to delete digital footprint to protect your privacy.
Reach out to the website administrators or support teams to remove information about you that is publicly visible on that website. If you want to make a request then you can fill online form on that particular website or you can send an email and attach that information which you have to hide from others then administrators’ delete digital footprint from that particular website.
4. Delete Old Social Media Posts
You should remove all old social media posts or accounts that you no longer want the public to view. Henc, to make this process easy, many social networking sites, like Facebook, have a bulk delete option.
5. Opt-Out of Data Collection
To avoid data collecting and strange advertisements, define the privacy of the most often visited sites and apps. Look for other ways how you can minimize the collection of data about you and change your settings to suit it.
6. Use Privacy Tools to Delete Digital Footprint
However, there are elaborate ways with which you can avoid such websites from using your data and they include using browser plugins and/or privacy software. Some of them you may employ to guard the data of your online browsing which comprises of ad blockers, anti-tracking extensions, and virtual private networks (VPN). Decide which of the tool you want to use and then download and install that tool on your devise to reduce tracking and monitoring.
7. Regularly Clear Your Browser History
It is recommended to create a daily habit thus deleting the cache, cookies, and history from the used platform so that no traces of the committed activity remain. Also, it can protect you from some people who can look at traces, and prevent websites from identifying the surfing and trace activity.
8. Set Up Alerts
Set a Google Alert on your device and be aware of unauthorized access to your internet visibility. By doing this, you sign up for alerts anytime. Besides this, regularly check these notifications and respond appropriately if any sensitive or undesired information is displayed you can immediately take action against it to delete digital footprint.
9. Review and Adjust Privacy Settings
Make sure you are revealing the minimum amount of personal information on the online platform and adjust the privacy settings on your online accounts daily. Use the tool’s privacy to limit who may view or access your information.
10. Don’t Overshare on Social Media
One may constantly feel pressured to provide excessive amounts of information on social media, which increases the risk that it will be used against you. It could harm your standing. Therefore, you can even remove or archive any posts that might have a bad effect on you to delete digital footprint. Being careful about what you post is essential to maintaining a clean digital footprint.
11. Create Unique Passwords for Every Online Service
Although most people use the same password for various accounts or even have a list of passwords saved on their devices, we have long understood the need to create strong passwords. Similarly, take a simpler approach and use our Google or Facebook accounts to log into many websites and apps.
12. Ask Google to Remove Search Results to Delete Digital Footprint
You may be shocked to learn how much information Google has on you when you ask yourself “What does Google know about me?” This is true when you search for yourself online. Requesting personnel information to be removed from Google is known as the “Right to be Forgotten”.
You can ask Google to delete digital footprint of any unnecessary or obsolete information about yourself by putting up a request. Further, ask Google to exclude specific search results connected with your name by filling out the Personal Data Removal Request Form. You ought to mention the following in your request:
- URL(s) of the Content: List of exact URL(s) of the content that you wish to remove from Google’s search results.
- Content Description and Relation to You: Check out the updated trends in the sphere of safety in the Internet and privacy preservation. Informed decisions about the material you share online can be created when you understand how the data is collected and used.
Thus, having learned about these processes and adopting the measures described in the Avoid Delete guide, one can safeguard their privacy and regulate the information about them on the Internet.
13. Educate Yourself to Delete Digital Footprint
So, make sure to regularly review and update your privacy settings to stay vigilant in monitoring your online presence, and consider using professional tools for thorough and effective data erasure. Therefore it will help you maintain a minimal digital footprint and safeguard your confidential data.
14. Understand Google’s Data Collection
Google collects all the data through its services, providing a personalized experience for the users. Usually, when you delete digital footprint or clear your browsing history, it typically removes all the data that is practically visible to you, preventing some unlawful usages. However, that may not always mean that all traces got wiped off Google’s server system completely. Moreover, if you are concerned about your data or privacy, you can take the following steps:
- Inspect Privacy Configurations: Regularly check and modify privacy options on your Google account to manage the collection and utilization of the data collected about you.
- Manage Activity Records: Google allows users under its program which enables them to view & control their activity records via tools like Google My Activity. There is a possibility of deleting certain entries or documentaries or even wiping the whole activity data.
- Use the Incognito Mode: Using incognito mode during your browsing protects saved data such as cookies and history from being stored while surfing online.
- Consider Privacy Tools: In addition, some tools and services increase privacy levels e.g. VPNs whereas some browsers are built to protect an individual’s privacy.
Limitations of the Manual Solution to Delete Digital Footprint
There are multiple drawbacks to the above-mentioned method to remove digital footprint:
- Manually searching for and removing personal information from multiple websites can be a time-consuming process.
- Some information or data may be missed or difficult to remove on various platforms where data may be copied
- Manual methods are not effective in removing all the information from the online website.
- Effective manual removal needs excellent knowledge and understanding of privacy settings and data management,
- Different websites and services have different policies for data removal. Therefore it is hard to remove a digital footprint.
Professional Solution to Instantly Delete Digital Footprints
SysTools Data Wipe Software remove digital footprint permanently. This tool erases your digital footprint from the device completely without any difficulty. Also, this tool has multiple options to wipe all digital footprints.
Key Features of the Expert Solution to Erase Digital Footprints
- Removes all data residue data that is no longer in use or accidental exposure of confidential information.
- To remove any evidence of data recovery, use the Quick Selection (File & Folder) Data Wipe tool. This clears off program traces such as caches, logs, temporary files, and recent file lists. It also creates reports on data deletion after the audit trail has been finished.
- Delete digital footprint for computer decommissioning, or destruction or reuse.
- Adherence to more than 20 international standards, such as NIST, ISO, DoD, and others.
- Delete all data from all of your storage devices, including SSD, HDD,USB, PATA, SATA, NVMe, and others.
- Overwrite all data using several wipe techniques, such as military-grade standards from the US Air Force, US Department of Defense, and Russia (GOST-R-50739-95; 2 passes); British HMG IS5 (3 passes); Peter Gutmann (35 passes), etc. (2 passes).
Steps of the Expert Solution to Delete Digital Footprint from Internet
- At first: Right-click at the Start » All Programs » Data Wipe Software will be opened.
- To remove all the data covered in the previous subtopics, click on the Select Folder button to choose the folder to sanitize.
- Navigate to define the location where the wipe folder is to be taken from.
- Next, go to Select Folder button to include the wipe folder in the software.
- To start scanning for the folder/file, please click on the Next button.
- Once the scanning process is over, you will be able to ‘Select’ the Data Wipe Methods.
- Many ways can be used to erase data. 1st is less pass means take less time and 2nd is more pass take more time, So, choose according to you.
- After selecting the Wipe method, click on Wipe to start the deleting process on your computer Hard drive.
- The next warning, shown is For deletion of this folder Find an explanation of this action Click Yes.
Note: Data that were wiped will not be retrievable in any circumstance anymore.
- The mentioned Wiping process has been initiated and it was continued.
- The pop-up displayed once the wipe process is complete, click Ok.
- Completing should then show you the Details of deleted folder.
Conclusion: Delete Digital Footprint
In this article, we have discussed how to delete digital footprint and following steps taken to take proactive measures to manage your digital footprint. Furthermore, you can better protect your privacy and control the information available about you online. So, make sure to regularly review and update your privacy settings to stay vigilant in monitoring your online presence. Therefore it will help you maintain a minimum digital footprint and safeguard your confidential data.
Frequently Asked Questions: Remove Digital Footprint
Q1. Why should I delete digital footprint?
Ans. You can protect your privacy from being exploited online, reduce online tracking, and prevent identity theft by deleting your digital footprint. Also, it helps you to prevent hackers or cybercriminals.
Q2. How can I find out if my information is available on the Internet as I have to delete digital footprint?
Ans. Begin by searching your name on Google. This gives you information that is available about you on that platform.
Q3. How do I erase or deactivate unused online accounts to remove digital footprint?
Ans. All in all, most of the websites and platforms have the choice to delete or deactivate your account in the settings. View the list of online accounts that are not in use so that you can easily delete unused accounts.