How to delete yourself from the internet (complete step-by-step guide)

Every click, search, and online profile adds to your digital footprint, and in today’s world of data harvesting and surveillance, that footprint can be used, sold, or even exploited.

Fortunately, there are practical steps you can take to regain your privacy. This guide offers a complete walkthrough of how to remove your information from the internet, minimize your exposure, and stay more private going forward.

Why would you want to delete yourself from the internet?

There are many practical reasons to start cleaning up your digital footprint, not just because you feel too exposed or want a clean slate. For example:

• Improve employability: Many employers search the web for information about potential hires. You might not want outdated profiles or personal posts influencing their first impression.
• Avoid targeted ads and profiling: Advertisers constantly scrape the internet for data to build detailed profiles of potential clients. This can involve invasive tracking and lead to unwanted targeting.
• Protect yourself from abuse, stalking, and bullying: No one should have to deal with cyber abuse, stalking, or bullying. If you’re dealing with it or simply want to reduce your risk, taking steps to limit your online presence can help you feel safer and more in control.
• Reducing spam calls and messages: Spammers often obtain contact details from data brokers and people-search sites. Deleting your information online reduces the chances of being targeted.
• Preventing identity theft: If your personal information is publicly available, it becomes easier for bad actors to impersonate you. They could open bank accounts, take out loans, or make purchases in your name.

How to delete yourself from the internet in 5 practical steps

You might be unable to remove all mentions of yourself from the internet. Luckily, you can still take steps to shrink your digital footprint and make it much harder for others to piece together your personal information.

Step 1: Remove your name and info from Google

Chances are, Google has access to quite a bit of your personal information, especially if you use its products like Search, Gmail, or other services, as many people do.

Let’s explore how to remove that data from Google.

Using Google’s removal tools

Removing your information from Google search results helps prevent it from appearing when someone searches for your name or related keywords. However, this doesn’t remove the content itself from the web, as it’ll still be hosted on whatever website it was found.

Here’s what to do:

1. Go to the Results about you page and click Get started.
   
2. Add your name(s) and click Continue.
   
3. You can choose to check for more than one name by clicking + Add another.
   
4. Enter any contact and address information you want to check for, then click Continue.
   
5. On the next page, select how you want to receive an alert if Google finds results about you via its search engine. Check the box to confirm that you’re only checking for your information, not someone else’s. Then, click Save.
   
6. Click Finish on the next page.
   
7. If the check returns any data about you, you can continue with a removal request to have that data taken down from the Google search engine.

If you already know where information about you appears on the web and you want to remove it from Google search results, do this instead:

1. Go to the Google content removal page.
2. Choose the kind of content removal request that aligns with your needs. I’ll choose to remove explicit personal images for this demonstration.
   
3. Scroll to click Start removal request.
   
4. Scroll to enter your personal information.
   
5. Add the URLs from which you’d like Google to remove content about you.
   
6. Add extra explanations as demanded by Google in the specified boxes.
7. Check the confirmation box and type your full name into the signature box. Finally, click Submit.
   

You’ll get a confirmation of your request and later an update on Google’s final decision. Note that the exact steps may differ based on the kind of content you want to remove from search engines.

Step 2: Delete or deactivate online accounts

The average internet user juggles dozens of personal accounts. That’s a lot of sources where your data could potentially be exposed or misused. To reduce the risk of that happening, find and close your unused or less-used online accounts. I’ve linked to our comprehensive guides for some of the most common online accounts you may want to start with:

• Social media: Facebook; Facebook Messenger; Instagram; Snapchat; TikTok; X/Twitter; Telegram; Kik.
• Shopping and e-commerce: Amazon, eBay, AliExpress.
• Email accounts: Gmail; Yahoo Mail.
• Gaming and streaming accounts: Steam, Netflix, Twitch, Spotify.
• Cloud storage accounts: Dropbox.
• Dating platforms: Tinder, Bumble, OkCupid.

You may also want to delete any personal blogs and self-hosted websites you have.

Step 3: Remove yourself from forums and threads

Don’t forget to scrub your personal information from online forums you’ve commented on.

The most popular forums that come to mind are Quora and Reddit, but there are other, less popular platforms you might have signed up for. Depending on how the online forum is run, you can try the following:

• Delete your account: Some online forums remove your personal information once you delete your account.
• Delete individual posts: Forums like Reddit keep your posts live, even after you’ve deleted your account (although they’ll no longer be associated with your account). So, on these forums, track down your comments and interactions to remove them first before deleting your account.
• Contact administrators or moderators: If the forum doesn’t allow you to manually delete your posts (this can happen with smaller or older forums), you may have to contact the admins and request removal.

Step 4: Opt out of data brokers

Data brokers and people-search sites collect personal information from a wide range of sources: public records, social media, online purchases, and even marketing databases. They then aggregate this data to create detailed profiles, which they sell to advertisers, insurance companies, recruiters… basically anyone interested.

Unfortunately, removing your personal data from these sites isn’t always simple. The manual route involves identifying which data brokers hold your information (there are hundreds), searching their websites for opt-out or data deletion instructions, and following their often tedious and inconsistent removal processes.

Even after that, your work may not be done. Many data brokers are known to repopulate their databases over time or ignore deletion requests altogether unless you follow up. As a result, staying off these sites often requires persistence: regularly checking back and submitting new requests as needed.

Luckily, you don’t have to do all this manually: ExpressVPN’s Identity Defender is a service available to our U.S. customers that includes a data removal tool. It scans dozens of data broker sites to see where your personal information is being listed and automatically requests its removal.

Step 5: Delete or anonymize unused apps

Most people have apps on their phones they haven’t used in months, even years. But even when unused, some of these apps may still have access to parts of your phone and can quietly collect personal data in the background. Over time, that adds up to a surprising amount of sensitive information.

To stay protected, it’s best to delete your accounts within those apps first. Then, uninstall the apps from your device.

How to prevent future data collection

Now that you’ve deleted your sensitive information from the internet and have a substantially smaller digital footprint, you should keep it that way. Since you’ll most likely continue using the internet, here are some tips to ensure you don’t get overexposed again.

Use a VPN

A VPN encrypts your traffic and hides your IP address. This makes it more challenging for anyone to follow you around on the internet since you now have a randomly assigned IP address from the VPN to mask your real IP address.Privacy-focused VPNs like ExpressVPN offer extras to boost your online privacy and anonymity even further. For instance, ExpressVPN’s Advanced Protection suite keeps you away from phishing websites, which might trick you into divulging sensitive personal data. It also features an ad blocker to keep ad trackers at bay, while an anti-tracker makes it more difficult for advertisers to follow you around the web.

Use privacy-first browsers and search engines

Your browser and search engine are two of the most common ways your online activity is tracked.

Privacy-focused browsers, like Brave or Firefox with Enhanced Tracking Protection, are designed to block intrusive elements like third-party cookies, trackers, fingerprinting scripts, and cross-site monitoring tools.

Pairing these browsers with privacy-first search engines, such as DuckDuckGo, Startpage, or Mojeek, adds another layer of protection. These search engines don’t log your search queries or create user profiles, and they avoid storing personal identifiers like search history.

Pay with cash or crypto when possible

Payments made with debit or credit cards are easily traceable. Each transaction typically includes personal details like your name, billing address, and banking information.

To reduce your digital footprint, opt for cash whenever possible. It’s anonymous, untraceable, and leaves no digital trail. Of course, cash isn’t always an option, especially for online purchases or subscriptions.

In those cases, consider using cryptocurrency. Many online platforms now accept crypto (ExpressVPN included) as a form of payment, allowing you to complete transactions without tying them directly to your identity.

Avoid unnecessary app permissions

Only give apps the necessary permissions they need to work. For instance, a photo editing app would need access to your photos, but there’s no reason to grant it permission to your messages or contacts.

When granting necessary permissions, also look for instances to limit the permission range. Using the photo editing app as an example, you can choose to grant permissions to only the images you want to edit, rather than your entire image library.

Switch to encrypted messaging apps

Protect your everyday communication with family, friends, colleagues, and anyone else by using encrypted messaging apps. With end-to-end encryption, only you and the message recipient can read your communications.