Developers in Sweden have created a website that can help you delete yourself from your online presence with just a few clicks. Available at Deseat.me, Wille Dahlbo, and Linus Unnebäck designed the internet deletion site as a place for people to “clean up their internet presence.”.
The service lets you see all of the websites you’re signed up to or have accounts for and asks if you’d like to delete them or unsubscribe. It asks for your email address and password so it can scan for the sites you’re signed up to.
In the last two years alone, hackers have wreaked havoc on:
eBay (2014):
eBay asked 145 million users to change passwords after hackers stole customers’ names, addresses, and dates of birth.
Heartbleed (2014):
A serious vulnerability was discovered in encryption technology used to protect many of the world’s major websites, leaving them vulnerable to data theft.
Sony (2014):
A cyber attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment leaked the private details of 47,000 employees and actorsYahoo (2014): Details of 500 million user accounts were stolen by “a state-sponsored actor”, although they have yet to be made public.
Hackers claiming links to Isil managed to take control of CentCom’s Twitter and YouTube accounts, changing the logo to an image of a hooded fighter.
Ashley Madison (2015):
Hackers threatened to publish the names of up to 37m AshleyMadison.com customers – a dating website for adulterous affairs.
Talk Talk (2015):
Almost 157,000 customers’ personal details were accessed when hackers targeted TalkTalk’s website, stealing 15,656 bank account numbers, sort codes, and obscured credit card details.
MySpace (2016):
360m passwords and email addresses, believed to have been stolen several years before, were listed on a hidden internet marketplace on the dark web.
Dahlbo and Unnebäck said they take the privacy of users seriously and that the program runs on the user’s computer rather than their servers.
“So basically, the only thing you’re telling us is what accounts you want to delete. That’s it,” they said. The website uses Google’s security protocol, which means it doesn’t gain access to users ‘ information, they added.
Deseat.me is fairly limited at the moment. It requires users to have a Google email address that is used for all of their online accounts. So for those ancient MySpace and Bebo accounts that you signed up for with a Hotmail address, you’ll need to go to the websites yourself and delete your account.
It also hasn’t managed to retrieve account deletion information from every service yet so some appear with a grayed-out delete button. And it may never work for smaller sites. That said, it does already work with most major websites that users would be likely to have accounts with, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Evernote.
How to delete yourself from the internet
1. Go to deseat.me
2. Sign in with a Google email address
3. Go through the list of websites you’re signed up to and decide whether you want to “delete”, “add to delete queue” or “keep”
Deseat.me works for most major websites CREDIT: DESEAT.ME
4. If you have more sites associated with other accounts that you’d like to delete, you will need to visit these individually and follow their instructions
