How do you DFE effectively and efficiently? - Delete Fucking Everything!

[Coffee Shits]

Is there even a point to deleting an old Facebook?
I have a very long deactivated Facebook because the option to delete it didn't exist at the time.
Is there even any point to deleting it anymore or can I just assume they have already sold that data many times over? I might want to keep my old contacts list or check it in the future which keeps me from just doing it.

If it's cleaned out and locked down you're better off abandoning it. Starve Facebook of the few data points you'd give them by logging in and "deleting" it (lol no way is that data ever being destroyed for good).

 

[Kiislova]

A sufficiently strong EMP bomb detonated over San Francisco should do the trick.

Why not a Nuke and we can solve 2 problems at once?

 

[On a toilet]

Is there even a point to deleting an old Facebook?
I have a very long deactivated Facebook because the option to delete it didn't exist at the time.
Is there even any point to deleting it anymore or can I just assume they have already sold that data many times over? I might want to keep my old contacts list or check it in the future which keeps me from just doing it.

I've got a couple of really old facebook accounts I abandoned and they've both been taken over by someone else. One is a baptist church account with over 500 followers that I check out once a year or so to see how those are doing. The other kind of died three years ago after some edgelord tried to muscle in on some Mum's group. Did you really put contacts lists in???????

 

[melty]

I've got a couple of really old facebook accounts I abandoned and they've both been taken over by someone else. One is a baptist church account with over 500 followers that I check out once a year or so to see how those are doing. The other kind of died three years ago after some edgelord tried to muscle in on some Mum's group. Did you really put contacts lists in???????

How did they get taken over? Weak passwords?
That's not a bad "solution" if Facebook now has your identity confused with a church. Sometimes I think it's better to overwrite data because faggot companies don't always delete stuff when they say they do.
By contacts I mean old acquaintances from high school, etc. A lot of people's names have changed, so it's a handy list of people I don't really talk to, but might want to catch up with at some point in the future.

 

[Some JERK]

Unless your name is James or Mary Smith you're fucked.

 

[On a toilet]

How did they get taken over? Weak passwords?
That's not a bad "solution" if Facebook now has your identity confused with a church. Sometimes I think it's better to overwrite data because faggot companies don't always delete stuff when they say they do.
By contacts I mean old acquaintances from high school, etc. A lot of people's names have changed, so it's a handy list of people I don't really talk to, but might want to catch up with at some point in the future.

Just for the record it was a completely false account I created for work purposes to track a contractor who was ripping us off. It had a robust password but I only monitored it for about 3 months until we proved that the vehicle they claimed we had stolen, they had been advertising on facebook for sale at the same time. I only followed it up out of curiosity about a year later when I started getting emails of new posts to the dodgy email account I had registered it under in the first place. At the time, there were about 300 church members, it's now around 1500 - I initially thought it was all bots, but the contacts seems to be real people of a real church. I have no idea how this happened. The email address is still in my control.

 

[Aidan]

IntelTechniques.com | OSINT & Privacy Services by Michael Bazzell | Open Source Intelligence

Open Source Intelligence OSINT Training by Michael Bazzell

inteltechniques.com

Go check out this guy's book on just that, it's very comprehensive and easy enough to read for what it is. If anything it's a good first step into the world of avoiding tracking and minimizing your online footprint.

If you don't want to visit the site, look up "Michael Bazzell" book. If you don't want buying that book to be tied to you, go to a local bookstore and ask them to order it for you and pay for it in cash.
It's a lot of work and a lifestyle but I think it's worth it but I have a hard time finding people in the real world who agree with me.

edit: I don't think he mentions this in his books, but regardless of if you want the book or not, your very first step needs to be to identify every account you've ever created and still have access to.
If you still have access to your emails you've made in your life then you can almost definitely recover most accounts and then go in there. Off the top of my head here's a quick guide on your beginning based off of my experience.

• Write down all of your emails that you have access to (probably in a spreadsheet)
• Identify every account that is tied to each email
  • I recommend you use an email client like thunderbird to just mass download all of your emails and then use it to search them all at once and delete EVERY email you no longer need or at least store them offline for later parsing. Makes this easier.
• Line up every single account you have and categorize them if you'd like.
• Identify accounts you no longer need and make a note to delete them.
• Log into the accounts you will be deleting first
  • Change every field that has any potentially identifying information (overlapping account names for example) to something completely false.
  • Wait a day for their databases to update
  • Delete the account (now even if they don't actually delete it, their info is wrong)
• Now you should have a much more manageable list of accounts you want to keep.
  • Create new emails for them. Try not to use gmail, hotmail, yahoo, w/e. Proton is free and easy and shouldn't be able to skim your emails so I'd recommend it.
    eg (KiwiUsername.gaming@protonmail.com)
  • Now when you go through these accounts decide if you actually want to keep them or not, and if you really want to keep them, assign them to that new email.
  • Update any information with false info. (An alias may be helpful but that's up to you)
    • Ask yourself what that service actually needs to function. Almost none of them actually need your real name or phone number.
  • Delete any you no longer need (I recommend all social media)
  • Change the password to something unique and strong. KeePass may help you here.
• Maintain a list of all accounts and their information going forward. An encrypted spreadsheet could be used and you can do that using Veracrypt

That's wordy but I'm lazy you can break it down for the sake of brevity on your own. If you use Windows 10 just go ahead and give me your real name because it's basically giving Microsoft the keys to your computer, any file not encrypted I would deem skimmed by Microsoft already.

ps all of those sites like spokeo, whitepages, peoplefinder, etc etc are technically supposed to comply with takedown requests. I recommend you create a list of those as well and then devote some time each weekend or devote 1 Saturday to finding all of your pages or anything close to identifying you and then requesting it be taken down. Some of them have forms for it, many of them require you email.
Remember who you're dealing with here, these are data collators and their business is to remember everything, so use a throwaway email for this that you will just toss aside later.

 

[melty]

edit: I don't think he mentions this in his books, but regardless of if you want the book or not, your very first step needs to be to identify every account you've ever created and still have access to.

So, I find the idea of being nobody somewhat appealing, but I'm not sure I'm invested in it enough to take on all the required effort. I actually began doing something like you've suggested recently and immediately became overwhelmed. Every time I peel back a tiny layer I seem to find 50 accounts that I created when I was 12 that I don't remember. It's horrifying.
I knew because of sites like haveibeenpwned the information is out there, but I've been playing around actually looking at the information myself and it's also somewhat daunting. Some people may have noticed that when these things are leaked, they're usually a couple of years old, which means even if you start today you will still have data out there that was leaked years ago that you aren't aware of and can't do anything about if you are.
The best I can say is that a lot of the data can be boring, it was a lot of fun looking up people's suspected livejournal sockpuppets for about ten minutes until I realized that was a decade ago and I don't even care anymore.

If I had to start over, I guess I'd make every user name something like "and" that's impossible to search for, and just have a bunch of different emails and passwords. But at this point I question if it's worth slogging through everything from two decades or just trying to do better going forward.

In regards to removing information from Spokeo etc, I toyed around with Abine DeleteMe, which takes you off of people search sites. I found it took me off of nearly every website, but I did find one it didn't. They pretty much do what you've described, but if you don't want to do it yourself you can pay them $150 per year to do it for you.

Thanks for posting that book recommendation btw, it looks good.

 

[Aidan]

So, I find the idea of being nobody somewhat appealing, but I'm not sure I'm invested in it enough to take on all the required effort. I actually began doing something like you've suggested recently and immediately became overwhelmed. Every time I peel back a tiny layer I seem to find 50 accounts that I created when I was 12 that I don't remember. It's horrifying.
I knew because of sites like haveibeenpwned the information is out there, but I've been playing around actually looking at the information myself and it's also somewhat daunting. Some people may have noticed that when these things are leaked, they're usually a couple of years old, which means even if you start today you will still have data out there that was leaked years ago that you aren't aware of and can't do anything about if you are.
The best I can say is that a lot of the data can be boring, it was a lot of fun looking up people's suspected livejournal sockpuppets for about ten minutes until I realized that was a decade ago and I don't even care anymore.

If I had to start over, I guess I'd make every user name something like "and" that's impossible to search for, and just have a bunch of different emails and passwords. But at this point I question if it's worth slogging through everything from two decades or just trying to do better going forward.

In regards to removing information from Spokeo etc, I toyed around with Abine DeleteMe, which takes you off of people search sites. I found it took me off of nearly every website, but I did find one it didn't. They pretty much do what you've described, but if you don't want to do it yourself you can pay them $150 per year to do it for you.

Thanks for posting that book recommendation btw, it looks good.

It's a lot of work, but the first part is the hardest. If you just keep chipping away it it then it's better than nothing. The whole adage of "the internet never forgets" isn't true and is strangely less true as time goes on. Storing data isn't free and as services disappear a lot of the data does too; as time goes on they also will cull and lose some data and this usually starts with inactive accounts.

Though I don't think your kiddy accounts are a major problem, it's more the modern stuff that is actively trying to identify you on the web and then sell your data or profile analysis. Anything is better than nothing and if you just start good practice now without scrubbing old stuff, that is also better than nothing.
Once you get set up it's not too cumbersome, but you can't browse the web "normally" ever again.

 

[Sage In All Fields]

Google your real name
Change the usernames of any accounts that come up relating to you
Delete anything on those accounts that dox you
Wait a few months for Google to reindex
Go back through and delete
Google all the usernames you've had that have ever been linked to an account you've doxxed yourself on
Rinse and repeat
You'll never be able to get everything but internet rot will get that for you, just focus on laying low until it does