How To Remove Your Personal Data From The Internet | Tutorial

hello everyone the name's peak bradley peak and today i'm going to talk to you about how to delete your personal data this includes clearing out your social media accounts and removing any traces of yourself from data brokers we'll also be getting into a debate that has significant consequences for the online world that is the debate between american style free speech and europe's right to be forgotten are you ready to explore the online jungle with us q get the aston martin today information tends to be stored in various networks and clouds so even if i drown my laptop my photos and my music will still be intact this is because anything that i upload to the network stays there forever forever forever forever now this is a really fun piece of kit take a look at the wayback machine this is effectively a non-profit organization that functions as an archive for the internet if you want to see what your favorite website looked like say 10 or 15 years back well the wayback machine might be just for you but a tool like this really isn't just for fun for instance digging into a website's past could actually provide valuable information for potential investors for instance on a company or a product now at the same time having access to the internet's past can actually have some pretty serious consequences for people's careers and reputations one example of this is adeline lafourin a woman who regularly posted suggestive photos of herself online no big deal right well adeline actually worked as a secretary in the swiss parliament and one day her boss came across these old pictures accidentally and a subsequent scandal ensued and unfortunately adeline was actually forced to leave her job as a result of course this case got massive attention from journalists and many denizens of the internet so much so that adeline was actually soon very much on her way to becoming a successful porn star which i think she is today let's try an experiment i'm actually now going to google myself to see what i can actually find out about myself now i'm going to be using incognito mode so that my previous searches don't actually affect the results so for now let's try my first and last name [Music] right so it appears i am essentially a collection of sports jackets let's try this again but this time i'm going to remove the clothing manufacturer from the results now i can cross it out like this and now it seems i'll have to do the same with a few mountain tops in wyoming and colorado shouldn't be a problem so now we've pretty much got what we need i mean here you can see my youtube channel a link to my private instagram profile my linkedin and some other irrelevant stuff of course now since i haven't ever caught the attention of the media you can find most of the information about myself on social networks on twitter facebook linkedin and the like but let's take a look at how you can actually delete these social media accounts so if you'd like to protect yourself from your past mistakes i recommend actually deleting first of all any unused accounts and second of all thoroughly cleaning out the ones that you do use there's a bit of a problem here and that is that deleting profiles on social networks is not as easy as it might seem at first now this has to do with the purpose and structure of these services after all there's a reason why these are called social networks because across these networks like countless data on people places companies and other organizations and this data cannot fit onto one server and that's why it's effectively spread across the world via this network also social networks provide many different types of services which means they tend to gather this data and store it very differently so even if you delete your facebook profile your previous comments or chat history may still be visible you watch bro what are you talking about man facebook to delete or to deactivate that is the question whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous comments okay let's start with facebook there are two ways you can get yourself off of this site you've obviously got deactivation or deletion now deactivation on the one hand lets you hide your name your pictures and other personal information from public view but luckily it allows you to continue using messenger moreover you'll still be able to log into other services using facebook as well and plus you'll be able to reactivate your account at any time should you wish to do so now deleting your data on the other hand is more of a radical step and doing so does indeed result in the permanent removal of your personal data it also prevents you from using messenger or even logging into different services using facebook now if you do decide to do this your request is firstly sent to the facebook moderators and during the first 30 days you actually have the option to reactivate your account by simply logging into it however if you are confident in your decision it can actually take up to 90 days for all of your personal data to be removed from their system even so facebook will actually maintain certain information about your past activity but only law enforcement will have access to it so if you're trying to cover up a serious crime by deleting your facebook profile this probably won't help so let's move on to instagram this is really a lot like facebook i mean unsurprisingly they're both owned by the same company and as such you have the same two options deactivation or deletion and if we're talking about deletion it takes about 90 days for all of that data to be deleted now similarly law enforcement will still have access to information if needed so if you're trying to get away from a crime that you committed deleting your social media probably won't help however if you want to hide from your online past from say job recruiters it should be enough to just temporarily deactivate your accounts they won't have access to the information so let's move on to twitter and linkedin now these differ from facebook and instagram in that the deactivation actually results in the permanent deletion if it lasts for longer than 30 days this means that if you deactivate your twitter account you only have 30 days to log back in and if you don't then your information will be erased and your twitter handle will be up for grabs now linkedin functions just like twitter with its close account feature out of all of these networks twitter is the only one that warns users that their previous activity may still be visible on search engines even after deleting their account for instance google is able to show the deleted tweets of deleted users and to delete those tweets you'd actually have to submit a request to google not to twitter [Music] now when it comes to deleting information that was previously available online there's really a raging debate and this debate relates to the right to be forgotten now the question here is whether a person can request the factual information about themselves be deleted from search engines now america and europe have very different answers to this very question so let's talk about information brokers and the first amendment now the first amendment to the american constitution as we all know protects the freedom of speech this means that the right to publish factual information on the internet trumps both privacy and individuals right to confidentiality so if information is factual no one really has the right to request the removal of it so if you're looking for information on u.s citizens there are plenty of big name data brokers that will help you i mean like spokeo fradaris and white pages to name but a few now i actually entered my name into spokeo and i found 18 individuals who share i wasn't on the right page say so i actually entered my name into spokyo and i found 18 individuals who share my name living in the u.s and you'll see here to get information on these individuals it would actually cost less than a dollar and i wouldn't just be able to get their phone numbers i'd actually also get their emails details on their families previous addresses and so on pretty scary right you're right it's fact i also checked a few other american databases and radaris also found some information on 18 american bradley peaks just like me right you're right again yes it was you're right you were right now you'll actually see here i must say the details theodores provides are quite impressive aside from what you'd find elsewhere radar tells you about bankruptcies marriages divorces criminal records and even about people's neighbors i think companies like this are called data brokers right or db for short and they've been around for a long time and i'm talking long before the dawn of the internet i mean even as far as far back as the 1950s they began collecting information on people's credit histories and then scoring them as such they then unsurprisingly went on to monetize this information today data brokers are collecting information in a different way they're instead taking the information from social networks media and other public sources of information as a result they maintain detailed dossiers on 230 million americans and over 10 percent of the world's population what is this data doing well it's actually used for locating people sociological and statistical research marketing i mean even for targeted ads as we all know and much much more and moreover this business is totally legal in the us there have even been discussions about regulating this sector but unfortunately no concrete steps have been taken thus far but there is good news you can in fact delete yourself from the records of these so-called information brokers now the easiest way to do this is through services that actually specialize in deleting your personal data but they do cost a buck or two so if you don't want to pay for this you can use what's called the free diy opt out guide on delete me but in this case be prepared to spend quite some time on it since you will have to actually fill out each individual form for each individual broker now in europe thankfully personal data protection is much better and for this we actually have to thank a man by the name of mario costeka gonzalez now in 1998 mario ran in some serious financial problems and his home was temporarily repossessed now a local newspaper published a 36 word article on the mata and over a decade later mary actually filed to have the article removed from google forever so in this case mary argued that the old article negatively impacted on his business reputation which is fair enough now legal proceedings dragged on for four years eventually resulting in mario's victory so what did mario get out of this well the article remained on the website of the newspaper but it was actually deleted from the google search engine in spain which was incredible now mario's victory formed the basis for europe's right to be forgotten and even the day that mario's court victory went public 12 000 europeans filed similar requests to google asking for their personal data to be removed and soon enough google actually introduced a functionality that allowed exactly this now if you live in the european union and you'd like to delete yourself from google searches you can follow the link in the description below of course it can be argued that the right to be forgotten may go against the interests of society for instance the same mechanism could be used by dangerous people such as i don't know convicted pedophiles or scammers to actually hide a history that could be incriminating however this right does not extend the public lives of politicians i mean otherwise the right to be forgotten would simply become censorship now the laws surrounding personal data are not yet mature or unified different countries tackle this issue in different ways i mean europe on the one hand prioritizes the system's right to privacy whereas in the united states they steer in the direction of free speech and god we still haven't discussed china which takes a much more authoritarian government-controlled even orwellian path but we'll talk about that in a different video for my part i'll leave you with one bit of advice everything we do online leaves a trace and our personal data can be used by pretty much anyone including businesses advertisers scammers or even intelligence agencies 1006 have you got by martini yet all i'm saying you need to be cautious and think about each step you take in the online jungle because once something is online it's practically impossible to delete it the name is peek bradley peek and this is the some sub youtube channel and by the way it's perfectly safe to leave a like comment or even subscribe also i think [Music] you

Channel: Sumsub

Views: 680,986

Keywords: personal data, personal data privacy, personal data protection, delete personal data, gdpr, right to be forgotten, internet security, digital security, online privacy

Id: Qx60rSWtgio

Length: 14min 24sec (864 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 05 2021