Personal information has never been more accessible. Your social profile and posts can give away all sorts of details to people you know, and people you don’t – from potential dates to employers and identity thieves.
"Unfortunately, there isn’t a single, straightforward way to close every account."
There are all sorts of steps you can take to reduce your exposure, but policies and privacy settings change over time, and breaches can’t be ruled out. The surest way to protect yourself is to shut down your social media accounts completely. It may also be good for your mental wellbeing to cut ties with any platforms that you feel are no longer enriching your life.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a single, straightforward way to close every account. The process is different for each service, it isn’t always instant, and it doesn’t necessarily mean your information will vanish from the internet. The site operator may keep some content for their own continued functioning (your old posts may be preserved in threaded conversations, for example), or data may be retained to comply with legal requirements. Search engines may continue to show locations where your data was visible previously, even if the pages at the ends of those links have expired. Until they next crawl those URLs, snippets of your data may be exposed in previews and cached copies.
Here’s how to remove yourself from the biggest social networks – while
