What is a digital footprint?
Your digital footprint is everything you leave behind online. It includes social media activity (posts, comments, likes), accounts and profiles on various platforms, browsing history and cookies, photos and videos you shared, reviews and comments on websites, information in public and private databases, and mentions of you by other people. It can be used to profile you, target you with ads, or even discriminate against you (jobs, insurance).
Why reduce your footprint?
Reasons to minimize your traces: protect yourself from identity theft and doxxing, keep old posts from hurting you professionally, reduce ad targeting and surveillance, limit the data available when a breach happens, take back control of your online image, and guard against harassment and manipulation. Employers, insurers and others check digital footprints regularly. An old tweet can come back to haunt you years later.
Auditing your current footprint
First, take stock of what exists. Search for your name on Google (in quotation marks for exact results), search for your usual usernames, use sites such as Pipl.com or Spokeo to see what is publicly available, check Have I Been Pwned for compromised email addresses, search for your old email addresses and phone numbers, and run a reverse image search on your profile photos. Write down everything you find, then decide what to delete.
The internet never forgets. But with effort, you can make it forget a lot.
Deleting old accounts
You probably have dozens of old accounts you no longer use. To clean them up: use justdelete.me to find out how to delete accounts on 500+ services, start with accounts that hold sensitive information (financial, health, dating), download your data before deleting (your right to data portability), for accounts you cannot delete, replace all the details with fake ones, and keep a record of your deletion requests in case they are ignored. Delete the matching mobile apps too.
Cleaning up social media
On social networks, review and delete old posts that are embarrassing or sensitive. Tools: TweetDelete for Twitter (bulk deletion), Social Book Post Manager for Facebook, and Archive to download then delete your Instagram posts. Remove your tags from other people's photos, review the permissions of third-party apps that can access your accounts, and make your profiles private or limit who can see older content. Turn off search engine indexing in your settings.
Content you do not control
The hardest part is information published by other people. Strategies: politely ask people to remove photos or mentions of you, contact webmasters to request removal, in Quebec and Europe (GDPR) you have a legal right to be forgotten for some content, and Google lets you request removal of search results for some types of content (medical, financial and so on). For sites that refuse, services such as Reputation Defender can help (paid). Create positive content to bury the negative results.