In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data grab and the resulting suspicions surrounding targeted advertising, more and more people are beginning to appreciate the idea of deleting their digital footprints from the Internet – but where does one even begin?
Fortunately, Deletist has more than one answer for you.
Decent, comprehensive, non-biased information can be difficult to find, especially when it comes to something so nuanced as removing your data from the Internet. Deletist provides such information for common social platforms including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Google, with updated instructions coming for WhatsApp ASAP.
Once on the website, all you need to do is click at the top of the page the app icon for the service for which you want to delete your information. Doing this loads up a set of instructions not only for deleting your account, but also for downloading a copy of your data and erasing as much of your digital fingerprint as is currently possible.
Having this kind of information available is refreshing in and of itself, but the level of detail behind the instruction is especially invigorating given the breadth of the demographic that’s most likely interested in deleting themselves off the Internet. Too often, tech tutorials are geared toward people who need less instruction than suggestion while sometimes the non-tech crowd struggle to decipher the meaning of phrases “hamburger” and “drop-down icon” in context.
The site’s creator makes being a “deletist” accessible and easy for everyone.
One point that is brought up on the instruction page for Facebook is something that is especially important for those not in the know: if you use your Facebook (or Google, or LinkedIn, etc.) account to sign up for a service such as Spotify, wiping the list of linked apps and then deleting your account will make recovery for the service impossible.
For this reason, finding a way to move your service’s contact information from using Facebook (or the like) to using an email address is a good idea.
And, if you do delete Google and its related products, a word of advice: don’t switch to Yahoo.
Jack Lloyd has a BA in Creative Writing from Forest Grove's Pacific University; he spends his writing days using his degree to pursue semicolons, freelance writing and editing, oxford commas, and enough coffee to kill a bear. His infatuation with rain is matched only by his dry sense of humor.
