Press Cmd + Delete or Shift + Delete on useless accounts
The first thing you need to do is delete any old accounts – email, social media, shopping among others – that you have created. So it might be the first confusing email ID you can get Yahoo! or Hotmail or Rediffmail (yes, already have an email account on Rediff). Or the MySpace account that seemed pretty cool back then, has gone horribly wrong now. You can try AccountKiller.com and in just one glance several popular accounts have been snatched once and for all. There’s also JustDeleteMe, which tells you how easy/difficult/impossible it is to delete popular accounts you may have created once.
Check if you have ever been hacked or your data has been compromised
Haveibeenpwned is a great tool to check if your data has ever been hacked. If your data has been leaked then chances are some parts of your digital identity will always be online. But what you can do is check which accounts have been compromised and then start deleting them. Be prepared to spend a lot of time on this.
Trash your social media history
Shameful tweets? Probably. Notable Facebook post? Chances are high. Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t allow you to bulk delete your old tweets but there are third party services/apps that can do it for you. Facebook makes it easier as you can go to “Settings & Privacy”, then go to “Activity Log” and delete those less supposedly better post types. The problem with this is that if someone searches for you on Google, images and posts from Facebook will pop up, so you’re better off trashing them if you want to.
Be alert, be aware
It’s a pity but a lot of people online are quite careless with their data and thus end up sharing more than they should or they know. Choose browsers, search engines, and apps that don’t eat up data or are always lurking in the background.
