Turns Out There's A Way To Delete Yourself From The Internet

As we continue to live our life through our smartphones more and more, it is becoming ever harder to protect ourselves and our identities online.

Cybercrime, fraud and identity theft are growing problems for police, with the risk that our personal lives, locations, and our passwords can be made public by hackers for anyone to find without our consent.

If the Investigatory Powers Bill, often known as the Snooper's Charter, is passed into law by parliament, then every digital move you make will be recorded and held for up to 12 months.

But how do you go about deleting traces of yourself online?

Well the Independent reports that two Swedish men, Wille Dahlbo and Linus Unnebäck, have created Deseat.me, which allows you to log in with a Google account, and immediately see which apps and services are linked to it.

The men designed the Internet deletion site as a place for people to 'clean up their internet presence'.

You might be alright if you have one of these. Credit PA

After installing the app and services your email is linked to, you can begin to remove yourself from data collection tools and decrease your likelihood of being hacked.

"Privacy and data security is something we regard as extremely important," the team behind the app told the Mirror.

"In fact, it's our number one focus from beginning to end. That's why we built it to run on your computer. So basically the only thing you're telling us is what accounts you want to delete. That's it, and since we use Google's OAuth protocol we don't have access to any of your login information."

Other similar services such as Just Delete Me or Account Killer both hold massive directories of links you can use to delete account pages, helping you remove traces of yourself online.

When the web launched in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee stated : "The World Wide Web project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation.

"We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome!"

It's definitely gone a long way from there, hasn't it?

Featured image credit: PA Images & the Internet

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Topics: Internet

James Dawson

James Dawson is a Journalist at LADbible. He has contributed articles to LADbible’s ‘Knowing Me, Knowing EU’ series on the EU referendum, the 'Electoral Dysfunction' series on the 2017 general election, the ‘U OK M8?’ series tackling mental health amongst young men, and for its ‘Climate Change’ initiative in partnership with National Geographic.

@thejaytoday