Delete Yourself From Many Internet Sites By Pressing This Button (thenextweb.com) 46
Two Swedish developers have created a site offering a way to wipe your entire existence off the internet in a few clicks. schwit1 quotes The Next Web: When logging into the website with a Google account it scans for apps and services you've created an account for, and creates a list of them with easy delete links. Every account it finds gets paired with an easy delete link pointing to the unsubscribe page for that service. In a few clicks you're freed from it, and depending on how long you need to work through the entire list, you can be account-less within the hour.
I'm a little uncomfortable giving a stranger's web site access to my personal information - even if it is for the purpose of deleting it altogether. But the original submission ends with an interesting question. "Can we get this for government databases too?"
I'm a little uncomfortable giving a stranger's web site access to my personal information - even if it is for the purpose of deleting it altogether. But the original submission ends with an interesting question. "Can we get this for government databases too?"
Re: (Score:2)
how can we monetize it?
Here is the procedure I used (Score:5, Funny)
2) I selected everything I wanted to delete
3) I pressed the delete bu
Re: (Score:1)
3) I pressed the delete bu
ALL GLORY to the HYPNOTOAD!!!
Trust us (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, send us your personal information and we SWEAR that we will try to help you delete stuff from other websites. Also free candy and puppies.
Phishing attack on Trump ... (Score:2)
... this is perfect.
A great big "Meh!" (Score:5, Informative)
I tried it, but it only finds Google-related accounts. Obviously, since your Google email is all it has to go by.
There's a ton of accounts and subscriptions that I've got that this app knows nothing about.
Why do they assume that all my accounts are necessarily linked to Google?
Less than useful, unless you view the entire internet thru Google, in which case you've got worse problems than a few excessive accounts.
Re: (Score:2)
Is there someone out there breeding iguana and something else like, say, alligators?
Don't get me wrong, alliguanas would be awesome looking but I don't want them roaming the streets...
Something that can climb a tree and has any of the traits of and alligator creeps me out.
Re: (Score:2)
because that's what the OP announced here.
Now, I didn't need to try to see it was google -only...
Coincidence? (Score:3)
This article popped up right as I'm watching Snowden which, of course, makes me 100x more intrigued.
Wait...do these guys want me to log in with all my credentials?? Now I'm confused...
Re: (Score:1)
Ahah, same here, just finished watching Snowden too
Google account settings... (Score:5, Interesting)
Does it do anything that you cannot do by just going into your Google profile?
If you go to myaccount.google.com, on sign-in and security you can manage all connected apps and sites, on device activity you can see devices used to login with your account, and on personal info & privacy you can control what Google logged from your activity.
Obviously, there are also options to delete your Google account altogether, and I doubt this app thing will do anything more than that.
If it doesn't, it's just too risky to give your account info like that for the extra convenience. Just get into your profile and adjust things yourself, it's not that hard.
Also, no matter what these deletion services tell you, they cannot guarantee that some of that info won't be kept in some Google or other website services. They'll be limited to Google's API after all.
For everything else, it's just better to go the pre-emptive route. Use private/anonymous browsing, create separate accounts, VPN, Tor, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, it appears to do more. Looks like it touches anything that you could log in using google OAuth, so depending on how you've got accounts configured it could remind you of stuff you're signed up for and forgot about.
You can shut all that down from the Google side. The other sites will still be holding OAuth tokens, but Google's OAuth servers will refuse to validate them.
Re: (Score:2)
Last time I checked, the OAuth spec does implement an endpoint where you can query the OAuth server for a list of places where your token can be used.
Reminds me of... (Score:1)
Not REALLY... (Score:4, Interesting)
Delete Yourself from the Internet! Not REALLY...
The idea here is that you can remove yourself from social media -- they just provide simple shortcuts to get you to the right URLs at the various social media sites such as facebook, This is nice -- but hardly insightful. What is needed is an ability to filter key words in search page rankings. Simple terms: Make Google and Bing ignore Phil Smith (or whoever's) name on particular web pages. It's complicated trying to explain how search algorithms rank pages but a part of it has to do with linking to sources. If a page about Phil Smith (at say, the LA times) is linked to by a bunch of other sites that never MENTION Phil Smith but just point to the article then a search at Bing or Google of "Phil Smith" will show the article higher (closer to the top) than any other web page about Phil Smith.
I took advantage of this when my Nephew was kidnapped (parental abduction) a few years ago to keep his name and the names of his kidnappers appearing high in search results by creating a few dozen pages cross linked to each other and linking to any news articles that would surface. It worked well at the time and my nephew was recovered.
Now, how to "undo" that kind of ranking? My daughter was kidnapped a few years ago (age 10) and recovered alive. It was horrific what happened and the monster got life and then some. I've spent countless hours going to various news outlets and blogs requesting they change JUST my daughter's name from "%HER NAME%" to "THE VICTIM" or somesuch so that if you do a google search of just her name you no longer see HER (well -- almost -- I have one more thorn -- IBTIMES.COM which have ignored my requests but I'll get them eventually). Then I simply request google to re-index the offending article. And for the most part most sites have been accommodating. IBTIMES.COM not so much. They haven't acknowledged I exist but I'll ware them down.
When googling my daughter, I've managed to get pages and pages of search results of stories about her and the ordeal she suffered down to just one that fluctuates it's ranking between the top 3 pages. Why go to all this trouble? Because EVERYONE google's themselves -- or friends and I'd like my daughter to have SOME amount of privacy about her ordeal.
Rather than deleting oneself from social media (which honestly is fairly easy to do) we need something to streamline the process of what *IM* doing. That would be an amazing tool if just for children or victims of crime.
It's incredible difficult if not impossible to completely delete anything from the internet but if I can make it so it's not as easy as just typing my daughters name in a search engine and finding out what happened to her in graphic detail then that's a win I'll happily accept.
Re: (Score:3)
An interesting viewpoint and experience I'd never considered. Are you open to the idea then of the offenders' having the same capacity of deleting their names and information of their offenses off the internet?
Ability to close any account should be mandatory (Score:2)
Even if it needs government regulations to enforce it;
All on-line services with a subscription of any kind,
shall be required by Law, to provide an equally easy mean of terminating one's subscription,
with requirement to drop everything but legal accounting.
It should also be made mandatory, to provide full access to all raw data and aggregations from an account.
All data collected by on-line services about Me, shall be viewable by Me and, I shall be allowed to revoke access to it by said service at any-time.
Is it so hard to include the link in the article? (Score:2)
Why do we need to check the source to get the link?
Fantastic (Score:2)
My Moto G4 does this backwards (Score:2)
In my settings I can allow or deny access to what allowing Google access allows viewed, it's just universal; not as per site.
I'm sure this is available within Google itself but I don't access Google+, youtube, or other with my log in email address, just searches. This wasn't on purpose, it just worked out that way.
As a bonus, being Android 6+ I can also disallow permissions I've previously allowed downloads.
Access to ALL YOUR EMAILS (Score:2)
Wow. HELL NO. I bet there are much, MUCH safer ways to see the linked-to-Google accounts. I believe one of them is supplied by Google.
That assumes.... (Score:2)