I’m willing to bet that if you asked a group of men what they’d like their last words to be, at least one of them would say: “Please delete my browser history.” Seems easy, right? Yet a quick Google search will tell you as much about trying to erase yourself off the internet: virtually impossible. While you can delete what holds the bulk of information about you online, specifically your social media accounts, there’s a lot more to your digital footprint than you might know. And those remnants are usually the toughest to scrub. So does that mean every mistake you ever made online has to live on forever?
“It is almost impossible to completely delete yourself from the Internet. On a surface level, you have to delete your accounts on every website or app you have ever logged into, and ask each and every company to delete any stored data they have of you,” says Luis Corrons, Security Evangelist at Spanish-based cybersecurity software company Avast. “Then there’s the data on your smartphone and what you do online, which is accessible to your internet service provider. A growing number of governments are making use of
