Can You Really Disappear Online?

Wirecutter Show is supported by Rocket Mortgage.

Your home is an active investment, not a passive one.

And with Rocket Mortgage, you can put your home equity to work right away.

When you unlock your home equity, you unlock new doors for your family.

Renovations, extensions, even buying your next property.

Get started today with smarter tools and guidance from real mortgage experts.

Find out how at rocketmortgage.com.

Rocket Mortgage LLC, licensed in 50 states, nmlsconsumeraccess.org, 3030.

But what is the most embarrassing thing that you have found about yourself on this project?

Oh, easily 200 live journal posts.

That was, yeah, without question.

And those are like diary entries, essentially.

We're not talking about the content today.

I'm Christine Sear Clissette.

I'm Kyra Blackwell.

I'm Rosie Guerin.

And you're listening to The Wirecutter Show.

This episode is called, Can You Really Disappear Online?

Hyra.

Hi.

It's just us today.

I know it feels so weird.

Rosie is out again.

So I thought this would be a great opportunity.

There's a vast difference in age between you and me.

Okay.

And I'm going to ask you a very Gen Xer asks a Gen Zer a question.

Okay.

How much of your life is online?

Like, what's your footprint online?

I am embarrassed to say that I've tried really hard to make sure a lot of me is online.

Like I Google myself constantly to make sure that my efforts are not in vain.

Like,

what is it?

How many search page results are actually about you?

All of them.

Okay.

It helps that I have a really nice, unique name.

But yeah, it's all me.

I think that only two pages of Google are about me.

I have a pretty small footprint.

You know, I've been a journalist for over 20 years, so there's a certain amount of my work that's online.

But for the last maybe 10, 15 years, I've been pretty guarded online.

And so I suspect.

Well, you know what?

Actually, I was really surprised recently.

I Googled myself and I was kind of surprised by how much information was online.

A lot of you.

Yeah.

Like, it's kind of creepy.

There was information about my parents and about my sibling and about old addresses.

And that is creepy.

Yeah, that part doesn't feel good.

That's definitely not what I'm trying to do when I want to be like online.

I like the things that I want up there, but then of course, there's always this part of the internet that gets more of you than you're willing to give.

That's right.

So it's not only creepy, there are real.

data privacy and security issues related to all this information that any of us have online, especially if we've had a lot of social accounts or we've just been living our life online.

And that's why I was super interested when I learned that one of our colleagues, Max Eddy, who he writes about data privacy and security for WireCutter, he took on this really wild task for an article he just published about trying to erase himself from the internet.

Wow.

Yeah, this is a big task, especially for someone who is a journalist, but I think for probably any human being in 2025.

Yeah, Max's amazing piece is actually part of a larger package for Wirecutter that just published.

It covers all kinds of data security issues from tons of different journalists at Wirecutter.

And some of the the topics are about what to do if your data has been leaked or stolen, or what to do with a late loved one's online accounts, and how your smart devices might actually be watching you.

So, yeah.

So creepy.

A lot of good information.

It's a lot of good information that I think is sometimes kind of hard to find.

And I'm so excited that Max is going to come on the show today.

So after the break, we will talk with Max about the modern-day quest to erase himself from the internet, why he tried it, and why you might want to too.

We'll be right back.

Huge savings on Dell AI PCs with Intel Core Ultra processors are here, and they are newly designed to help you do more faster.

They can generate code, edit images, multitask without lag, draft emails, summarize documents, create live translations, and even extend your battery life.

That's the power of Dell AI with Intel inside.

Upgrade today by visiting dell.com/slash deals.

Wayfair loves fall.

The crisp air, the cool nights, and of course, the seasonal lattes.

And as your trusted destination for all things home, Wayfair's got everything you need to cozify your space.

From comfy recliners to warm bedding and autumn decor.

Wayfair even has espresso makers, so you can make that latte at home.

You know the one.

Head to Wayfair.com today to shop curated collections of easy, affordable fall updates.

That's w-a-y-f-a-ir-r.com.

Wayfair, every style, every home.

Taking care of your skin is a personal daily ritual.

No matter what regimen works best for you, it's important to remember that great skincare doesn't have to be complicated.

With Clinique's classic three-step routine, fresh, radiant skin is as easy as one, two, three.

Clinique's iconic trio of products used to cleanse, exfoliate, and moisturize, is specifically created to address your skin's needs and provides a refreshingly simple solution for maintaining beautiful, resilient skin.

Twice a day, every day.

Great skin starts here.

Visit clinique.com to learn more.

Welcome back.

Today, we're talking with Max Eddy, who is WireCutter's writer covering covering privacy, security, and software.

He's written a lot about how to get the most out of your computers and your phones, and he's our in-house expert on how to protect yourself from online scams and surveillance.

Welcome to the show, Max.

Great to be back.

It's great to have you here.

Today, we're going to talk about this kind of gonzo project that you took on to disappear from the internet.

What does that even mean?

You are a journalist.

You have a big footprint on the internet.

How extreme did you get with this project?

So as you just said, I publish online and have done that for most of my working life.

So unless this was like a backdoor effort to fire me and not tell me,

no, I didn't delete any of my stories.

I didn't delete my bylines.

And I did actually end up leaving a lot of stuff up there.

Disappearing from the internet, the experts will tell you that that is a fantasy.

You can't actually do that.

So knowing that, I decided like, okay, if I can't disappear, then maybe I can get control and try to take control of as much of it as I could.

Why would you even think to do this?

What are the security implications for having your personal information and your photos and all your old embarrassing social media accounts and other info about yourself on the internet?

So why I did this is because it was an opportunity to sort of apply a lot of different strategies and kind of try them out.

But why normal people who are not me would want to do this is that, you know, there's a lot of information out there about ourselves that we we have shared knowingly on things like social media and other platforms.

And that is out of your control once you've put it out there.

So being able to take control of that information, I think a lot of people want to be able to do that.

They want to be able to present themselves the way they want to be presented online.

So you probably shouldn't set out to delete yourself from the internet because it's just not going to happen.

But if you try, you can definitely reduce the amount of stuff that's out there and control the stuff that is.

Okay, that makes sense.

I actually deleted my entire Facebook account because I saw that all the photos that I had on there were just, they were just making my skin crawl.

So I just, I just went ahead and got rid of that.

But what is the most embarrassing thing that you have found about yourself on this project?

Oh, easily 200 live journal posts.

That was, yeah, without question.

And those are like diary entries, essentially.

We're not talking about the content today.

Seriously, though, like I completely forgot.

I knew I'd signed up for that.

I did not remember writing 200 posts.

That's a lot.

That one in particular was sort of like being confronted with like an old version of yourself and having to like look at that distance between the two of you.

So, you know, that is one of the disorienting things that does happen when you try to clean up nearly two decades of internet use is you're going to find a lot about yourself that you've forgotten about and you will definitely notice that you're not the same person anymore.

This is making me so nervous about what is on the internet about me that I haven't found.

So we're going to get into all of the steps here that you took, Max.

And from your piece, what I've gleaned is that you basically tackled this in three different places that you really focused your effort.

Google was the first.

You really attempted to remove yourself from Google search results.

Number two was social media.

You audited your online accounts like Instagram, Facebook, and other accounts.

And then you tackled the third place was public records, which we will get into that a little bit later.

So let's talk about that first bucket, the Google bucket.

Why start with Google?

How did you figure out what was online about yourself?

And physically, what did you do?

Did you just do like a vanity Google, essentially?

I think a lot of people do go to Google first to see what's out there about them.

I think that's a very understandable impulse.

So I did start with Google because of that, because that's where most people are going to go first.

And for reasons we'll get into, that is where you're going to encounter a lot of people who have your information for sale.

So what I did was I went onto Google and I put in my name and I looked around at what was there.

I put in some variations of my name.

I put in my name plus address.

I put my name plus phone number.

I would recommend if you are curious about what's out there, start with those.

Also toss in just your phone number, just your address, any like email addresses or screen names that you've used.

So you're basically kind of being a detective of your own self.

You're a PI looking up all the information you can find.

I think that's a really good example because that's the kind of person that's going to be doing this if they're trying to find out about you, right?

But when you're searching for yourself on Google, you will be overwhelmed by the stuff that's on there.

So while I think it's good to get like a kind of lay of the land, you're going to drive yourself nuts if you try to make like a comprehensive list of every single place that you've been on there.

One way that I found was to use my password manager.

I've been using a password manager for a very long time.

I found out I had 356 accounts in it.

using another service called have I been pwned, which lists data breaches.

So you can enter your email address and see what accounts you have, whose information has been released online.

So using that, I was able to pare down that 356 to like 27.

And then going through manually, just looking at all the accounts that I had in my password manager, I found another like 30 or so that I was like, there's going to be a lot of information in these sites.

So once I had that list, I could start with that.

If you are not someone that is using a password manager currently, and you're listening to this and saying, oh, maybe I should be using one.

If you were to kind of sign up for an account for a password manager today, would that help you find all of those old accounts?

Or would it basically just be collecting all the accounts you're currently using?

So when you sign up for a password manager, if you've never used one before, it can gather them as you log into them.

And if you're not using a password manager, you know, I'm not going to shame people, but maybe do that.

It's really one of the best things you can do to protect yourself online is to have unique, complex passwords for every single site and service that you have an account with.

Okay, so just to reiterate though, it's not going to help you find those accounts you you had like five years ago or six years ago or 20 years ago.

It will help you going forward.

If you don't have that, then you are going to have to do some Googling.

You're going to want to look at have I been pwned.

I found have I been pwned to be really useful, not just for finding the accounts that had been breached, but also accounts that I had completely forgotten about.

Like last.fm.

I have not scrobbled a song in like 20 years and I didn't have it in my password manager, but it was in a data breach.

My information was in that and I was able to find that through have I been pwned.

Is have Have I Been Pwned?

Do you have to pay for that?

It is free.

Is that specifically a site that helps find data breaches?

It helps you find your information in data breaches.

So when you go to Have I Been Pwned, you enter your email address and it's going to search through all of its millions of records of data breaches.

And if your email address appears in that data breach, then it will pop up a little message below.

listing all of the data breaches where it has found that email address.

I'm emphasizing this because that's not going to be a complete list.

If it was a data breach that didn't have your email address or if it was an account that didn't have your email address, then it's not going to show up there.

So the tool is limited, but in terms of ways to check to see if your information has been exposed, this is by far the most comprehensive and easiest to use.

When you see that your data has been exposed in a data breach, changing your password can be a good idea if your password was exposed or if you're just concerned about it.

It's usually like a good policy in general.

But if your password wasn't exposed, then that's not really the issue.

The issue is that there was personal information about you exposed.

So for example, if you see that you were in a data breach, that means whoever has that breached information can now infer some things about you, that you have an account on this website.

What they can do with that is like try to log in as you.

They can try to find your password from another data breach if it wasn't in that one and just try it and see if it works because a lot of people recycle their passwords.

So what you do next is kind of going to depend on what information was exposed.

We actually have a story about this as part of this larger package about what to do after a data breach, where we do walk you through what you should do when this happens.

You know, there's an argument to be made that all of your information is already out there, but you need to kind of address every data breach separately.

Okay.

I'm writing that down on my arm and I'm going to do that right now.

I should probably spell that then.

It's have I been pwned P-W-N-E-D,

which is great to write out, but terrible to say out loud.

Such a millennial title.

Okay, so removing yourself from Google search.

How do you do that?

And how successful can you be at doing that?

So, Google actually offers a tool to help limit your appearance in Google search results called Results About You, that shows you results that have your personal information in it.

And this tool is limited, and it's really important that people understand that there are certain criteria that have to be met before Google will suppress that search result.

So, that's the first thing.

And the second thing is that that information is not going to be removed, it is only going to be suppressed.

So, the information is still out there, it just might not be appearing in search results, but that information is still out there, which is the second thing that I did.

So, the second thing I did was to address the sites that had my information.

Most of those are data brokers, and they compile information about individuals, and then they sell that information to whoever wants it.

So I went out to take care of that.

Can you explain what a data broker is?

They basically are like vacuuming up all of your information and selling it.

So yeah, data brokers gather personal information and then sell it.

They're usually taking it from multiple sources and in some cases they're connecting the dots that aren't connected.

So for example, maybe they're able to get a name and a phone number over here and a name and an address over there.

And now they've got a name, a phone number and an address.

And when you collate all that information together, you can assemble assemble some pretty specific dossiers on individuals.

And names, addresses, phone numbers, sometimes relations like cousins, parents, that sort of thing will be in these records that they have for sale.

What are some companies that people might be able to recognize?

Do you have any examples?

A lot of these companies might object to being called data brokers.

A lot of them refer to themselves as like people search sites or record search sites.

So there are companies out there who work to remove this information from data brokers, data removal services.

And some of the companies that they classify as data brokers would be Spokeo, That's Them, Alabamacourt Records.us,

NewEnglandFacts.com, WhitePages.com.

And again, these companies might object to that distinction.

I'm not going to make a judgment about that, but these are the sites that the data removal services are operating with.

So what do you do if you find that your information is on these data broker sites?

What steps can you take to get the information off of those sites?

So most of these data brokers are going to have some kind of mechanism to remove your information.

You can request that they take those records down.

And that process can be very tedious.

And it also requires you to like engage with them maybe more than you would be comfortable with.

I did try to do this and I got skezed out really, really fast.

Like I don't want to give them more of my information.

They're already selling it.

So you can do this on your own.

What I did for this story was to sign up with data removal services that do that for you.

So they search these data broker sites for your information and then they send the opt-out requests and then they handle all of the follow-ups and everything that goes with that.

So you never have to touch any of it.

Oh, I actually used one of those and I was so shocked at the things that it called from the internet.

Like my mom's address and phone number was attached to my information.

That's actually one of the things I found fascinating about this experience, by the way.

It was like the information sold by data brokers is freakishly accurate and long, and then it's not.

Like, I saw individuals that clearly were supposed to be me, like my name, my age, and a couple other pieces of information.

Like, well, unless there's another Max Eddie out there with the same age as me, like that's unlikely, but in different addresses or addresses near to where I used to live, but not there.

And I think this is really interesting because these companies are really selling themselves on the idea that you can find people,

but I'm not sure how true that is.

Like there is, yeah, a lot of accurate information there and there's a lot of not accurate information in there.

Well, I'm happy for that, actually.

How much does it cost to hire one of these or use one of these services, these data removal services?

Is it expensive?

Because that service sounds like well worth some money to me versus going through and trying to do this, you know, DIY.

So in our guide for data removal services, one of the things I discovered is that the cost of a data removal service is wide-ranging.

On the low end, I found one for $20 a year.

On the high end, it was well over $300 a year.

And the difference between them is very broad and complex.

But yeah, I think you're going to end up spending probably about $100.

And how successful have you found these services to be?

I had to sign up for about a dozen of these in order to write our guide about them.

And the problem with that is I had a bunch of these data removal services all removing my information at the same time.

And that meant we weren't able to correlate who was doing what work.

So we actually started a year-long experiment at Wirecutter where we have a bunch of different writers signed up with different services and we are tracking what results they see over time.

So like what the data removal services say and what certain specific data brokers say they have on these individuals.

And that's what we're trying to figure out is like how effective they are compared to each other.

I can can say that having signed up for a lot of them, there's a lot less information about me out there right now.

So they do work.

I interviewed some people at data removal services, and they told me that sometimes data brokers will relist your information even after it's been taken down.

It's like a whack-a-mole situation.

Absolutely.

And there are hundreds of these sites that are selling this information and they sell to each other.

So it's very complicated.

That's the downside of it.

You know, you sign up for this and it does a great job, but you kind of need to leave it there perpetually.

This is really a service where it's probably best to subscribe and have it just working all year long to clean up your profile online.

Yeah, so far that's what we think.

One of the things we're going to be looking at is like, do they actually do a lot more over time in this longer experiment that we're doing?

So, Max, just even this first step of approaching what information is about you on Google and how to kind of suppress those results or how to remove information from these data brokers.

It sounds a little bit intense and I think it might be intimidating for people.

I want to hear just your very simplified version of what we just talked about.

Sure.

So I think everyone should take a look at Google's results about you tool.

Google is the most popular search engine and seeing what's out there and using its own tool to suppress some of those results is a great first step.

It costs nothing.

It takes a few minutes to set up.

You can then go and send data removal requests to data brokers.

You can do it yourself.

I really want to stress, you can do this yourself for free.

There's a lot of data removal services that actually have free subscription options.

They will tell you where the stuff is, but you have to do the opting out yourself.

So you don't have to pay for these, but you will invest a lot of time and effort in that.

And if that's not worth it to you, or if you would rather just have someone else do it, take a look at a data removal service to do that for you.

And you can go to our website for specific recommendations on those.

Absolutely.

Awesome.

Okay, so we're going to take a quick break.

And then when we're back, Max is going to cover the last two steps that he took, which is scrubbing himself from social media and then tackling public records.

Plus, we'll cover some of the unexpectedly emotional parts of disappearing online.

Be right back.

Wayfair loves fall.

The crisp air, the cool nights, and of course, the seasonal lattes.

And as your trusted destination for all things home wayfair's got everything you need to cosify your space from comfy recliners to warm bedding and autumn decor wayfair even has espresso makers so you can make that latte at home you know the one head to wayfair.com today to shop curated collections of easy affordable fall updates that's w-ay-y-f-a-ir.com Wayfair, every style, every home.

Gun injuries are the leading cause of death for children and teens in the United States.

Some people avoid talking about gun violence because they don't think they can make a difference, but every conversation matters.

When it comes to gun violence, we agree on more than we think.

And having productive conversations about gun violence can help protect children and teens.

Learn how to have the conversation at agreetoagree.org, brought to you by the Ad Council.

This podcast is supported by OnInvesting, an original podcast from Charles Schwab.

Each week hosts Liz Ann Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Kathy Jones, Schwab's chief fixed income strategist, along with their guests, analyze economic developments and bring context to conversations around stocks, fixed income, the economy, and more.

Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/slash on investing or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome back.

Max, before the break, you told us about the first step that you took to remove yourself from the internet, which is figuring out how much of your information is online and definitely like checking Google.

So now let's talk about the last two buckets, which is social media and then public records.

Social media itself is kind of a beast.

How hard was it to remove yourself from everywhere, like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, like all of that stuff?

How did you go about doing that?

The thing about social media is that it's actually not the only place where I found my information.

I found that there are bio pages on Patreon and Kickstarter and other services like that.

So, you know, if you people are listening at home, like take a look at these other sites that you're signed up for and see what information you've shared with them and that they share publicly.

It's really startling what's out there.

And you can clean that up pretty simply.

But with social media, that's a little more loaded.

We interact a lot over social media and it doesn't necessarily make sense to like remove everything or entirely delete your account.

And in my case, I actually chose not to delete my account in most cases.

That said, deleting your account is easily the fastest and simplest way to do this.

I chose not to do that because I wanted to keep my accounts alive, but inactive.

And I was concerned primarily about impersonation.

Maybe some of that's vanity.

You know, I am a Google-able person and I didn't want someone else popping up on Twitter and pretending to be me.

But this can affect anyone, really.

A couple years ago, my aunt was on Facebook and discovered that someone else had created an account in her name and was going around to all the family members and asking for money.

Oh my gosh.

That happens so much on Facebook.

I feel like I hear that all the time.

But impersonation can happen to anyone.

And if you don't have an account on that service anymore, it can be hard to prove that you are the real you.

It is doable, but for me, it was more valuable to like.

maintain control of those accounts, but just leave them empty.

Most websites and online accounts are going to require you to enter information about yourself, and they won't let you create the account without that information.

They won't let you save the information unless it's all in there.

So you can't just delete your email address and then hit save and like Twitter will be like, yeah, that's fine.

I don't know who you are.

That's great.

So I created what the experts call synthetic data, which is basically just made up information about myself.

So imagine, if you will, Twitter account or a social media account.

There's like a username, there's a photo usually, and then all of that's tied back to usually an email address somewhere in in the background.

It's probably not visible, but it is part of the account.

So I tried to address all of those things.

I found a bitmap generator to create random colorful images, just sort of like dots, and I replaced all of my user photos with that.

I found a text generator and used that to create names and fill in information that required text.

So there's a lot of lorem ipsum style names for me around there now.

I wanted to get my name off of them and my screen names off of them as much as I could.

And then I used an email at masking service, which lets you create unique email addresses for like every site you want to sign up for.

What it does is it forwards any emails sent to that email address to your real email address.

And you can respond to it the same way, and it'll appear to be coming from the masked email.

And then, if you want to get rid of it for any reason, if you're getting a lot of spam, if you just don't want to, you know, you can't seem to get rid of that newsletter, it's there all the time, you can just delete the email address and it forwards to nowhere.

It's just gone.

Oh,

cool.

So, presumably, with all these unique emails and passwords, you're using, going back to the password manager, you're using the password manager to help you manage all of those, right?

Because like if I started a unique email for everything that I have, that would be in big trouble.

You're locked out.

Yeah.

I have 356 online accounts and I worked on 55 of them for this.

So yeah, I had like generated 55 unique emails for this project.

This seems like I should be giving a lot of people my masked email.

So the downside of like a lot of masked emails is that they are like random text.

Yeah.

And it's like, oh yeah, you can just hit me up at x123q57 at mosmail.com.

It's like the old version of dating and people being like, can I get your number?

And you're like, yeah.

It's like six digits.

So the idea here, though, is when you're using these masked email services, they're great for a lot of things.

But what I really wanted to do was to break apart all the connections between my accounts.

So remember earlier when I talked about how data brokers get information from lots of different places and connect those dots together?

I wanted to make that either impossible or very, very difficult that they would not bother trying.

So, all of the pictures are different.

You're not going to be able to put them together and say, Look, same user photos here and here.

People recycle those a lot.

They won't see the same usernames.

As often as I could, I tried to get rid of usernames because most people recycle those as well.

And if you don't want to have a consistent internet presence, you want each of those to be different.

And then, email, while that's not usually visible to the outside, the companies who run those services can see that.

And I wanted to make sure that you wouldn't be able to connect it by email either.

So every piece of it that should have been searchable, I tried to make unique.

Do you suggest that like everybody does all of this?

No.

Okay.

No, but I think that it's, I mean, for the purposes of this project, it was like, let's see if we can do this.

How painful is it going to be?

And it's, I think it's a useful framework.

Okay.

So let's say you're signing up for something that's like low value to you personally.

Like you just need to sign up for it for like whatever reason.

I don't know.

Like to get a a 28% off coupon or something.

Oh yeah.

Oh yeah.

No, that's a perfect example.

So you have to create an account somewhere where you don't actually want to have an account.

Don't use the same username that you use everywhere.

Use a masked email and don't put a photo of yourself on it.

Use just any photo you can find or generate one randomly.

And I think that this can be really useful on social platforms where like your actual presence isn't required.

If you're playing like a video game or something, people don't need to know your name or see your face and like your friends, you'll find them in some other way.

So, I think people can use these tools and then make decisions about how much of their information they want to share.

Like, how public do they want to be with this?

You know, on something like Facebook, where you're making kind of a judgment about who the person is,

you're probably going to want to use your name.

I think they have policies about that still.

And you're probably going to want to use a photo that people you care about would recognize.

But for other things, you don't need to do that.

So, how long did this take?

The whole project was over the course of about three weeks or so.

For the social media accounts alone, that was like three or four days.

It gets a little hazy for me towards the end because working on Facebook was such an absolute nightmare for me that I like frankly could not keep track of what was happening in my life.

I went into a fugue state and emerged several days later.

It does take a lot of time, and especially what I was trying to do to remove my posts from these accounts, but leave the accounts up is very difficult to do.

Most sites, pretty much every social media site I went to does not have an option to like edit what posts are available.

So I had to find other ways to do this.

So in the case of Live Journal, I mentioned earlier, I had to go through and manually delete every single one of them.

And for Twitter, I used a tool called SID CYD for it.

It stands for clawback your data.

And this will automatically delete your posts, your likes, your direct messages, and your retweets.

There are other tools that will help you do this.

I had a really good experience using Sid on a personal Twitter account.

It still takes a long time, though.

For an account with like 70,000 posts, it took about three and a half hours to get through just the posts.

Max, did it feel weird to remove like images and personal journal entries and all these like deeply personal things that, you know, many of us share parts of ourselves on social media.

I'm wondering, like watching yourself kind of disappear from these places, what did that feel like?

It was awful.

I can only say how it felt for me.

I don't know what other people would experience.

But, you know, at first it was really fun because it was like, oh, look at all this stuff.

It's just like flying by.

You see it for like a second.

It's like watching your life flash before your eyes.

But then I sort of took in like, oh, every time something appears there, it's being deleted.

So like, oh, look, there's a picture of my wedding and it's gone.

And there's a picture of my pet rat, Johanna, gone.

And it starts to add up after a while it starts to feel pretty bad whatever urges were there to share my life and connect with people like that it hurt that a little bit i had no problem deleting my facebook account

and it's so different for everyone like i was agonizing over like the tagged photos on facebook and i'm talking to my spouse about that and they're like oh i deleted those years ago tags are stupid what's your problem like i don't know what my i mean i know what my problems are but like everyone's going to respond to it differently and i do want to underline that like, sometimes it's painful, sometimes it's liberating.

Like it's going to be a different experience.

And I think that's also going to inform how you go about that.

I would be lying if I said that the reason why I didn't delete all these accounts was because of privacy and control reasons.

Like some of it was just hard for me personally.

Okay, Max, so let's talk about this last bucket.

It's about tackling public records.

And this does, I will admit, sound very boring, but it also does sound important.

So what should people absolutely know about online public records that have their info?

So removing public records is really difficult because the existence of their record is usually required by law.

For example, real estate purchases, voter registration, some court proceedings, stuff like that.

And there's very rare exceptions for when that can be changed.

So in New York State, we have certain laws that say that if you are a survivor of domestic abuse, then you can have public records either redacted or removed.

And that's true in other places as well.

But if you just don't want that information out there, you don't really have any means available to do that.

And that's why it might be best to just see what's available in your state.

And perhaps there's some options that are available for you.

You will have to do some of that on your own.

You cover some of that in your piece that just published.

Yeah, you can read about my experiences doing that.

Great.

So, Max, before we move on, I just want to make sure that these last two areas that we talked about, social media and public records, that we have the cliff notes for people at home if they're interested in doing this.

So give us the very, very simplified version.

For social media, what are the steps?

For deleting your social media information, deleting the account is the fastest and easiest way to go about doing that.

What I did, removing the data and then keeping the account alive is much harder.

So everyone's going to have to make a choice about that.

And then when it comes to public records, just be aware that it's very difficult to get that information removed.

Finding it can be an educational process for what's out there about you.

And it's also an opportunity to like engage with your community and find out what rules and laws are available for you.

Before we wrap, we usually ask our guests one final question.

What's the last thing you bought that you've really loved?

The Kobo Libra color.

It's an e-reader and I'm a sucker for e-ink.

So why do you like this better than a Kindle?

I broke up with Amazon many, many years ago.

Okay, Okay, good for you.

I like a lot of things about Kobo.

The direct integration with my library is really nice.

I can have that delivered directly there.

I also just like how they look.

I like how they work.

Well, thank you so much, Max.

I feel like I learned a ton this episode.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Happy to be here.

Kyra,

do you feel intimidated by this list of things that you need to go out and do now?

Okay, I'm going to be honest.

I haven't even done the things from the last data and security thing that we talked about, like getting a password manager.

Well, you just have more things to add to your list then.

Yay.

What was your biggest takeaway?

I mean, one of the biggest things that I really learned is that a lot of the information that I was so proud to have about myself online, like people are making money off of that.

Yeah.

So that's not great.

Don't love it.

And there's also just so much more information that I do not want on the internet.

Right.

So to that end, I think I'm going to try using Google's results about you tool because I do have delete me and it should be culling some of that information that I don't want on the internet but I don't want to rely just on that you know I should be doing my own research too yeah I feel like when it comes to all this data privacy and security stuff I get a little intimidated and it just kind of I freeze up and I don't do anything and so I think I really need to just pay attention and I think the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go to that site have I been pwned which is what is that name it's it's a ridiculous name but you wouldn't get it I'm too old but I am going to go to that site and see what data privacy breaches my information has been involved with to just kind of get a lay of the land.

I like it.

So if listeners at home want to find out more about Wirecutter's coverage, or if you want to check out any of the products that we talked about or to read about Max's journey or any of these other data privacy pieces that we had come out this week, go to nytimes.com slash wirecutter or you can find some links in our show notes.

That's it for us this week.

Next week, Rosie will be back.

Thank you so much for listening.

Bye.

The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by Rosie Guerin and produced by Abigail Keel.

Engineering support from Maddie Mazziello and Nick Pittman.

Today's episode was mixed by Catherine Anderson.

Original music by Dan Powell, Marian Lozano, Alicia Ba Yitoupe, and Diane Wong.

Wirecutter's deputy publisher is Cliff Leapy.

Ben Fruman is Wirecutter's editor-in-chief.

I'm Kyra Blackwell.

I'm Christine Syr Clissette.

Thanks for listening.

And you have to be my accountability buddy.

Your accountability buddy?

Yeah, I will totally.

Accountability buddy, Christine.

You gotta make it one word.

Wayfair loves fall.

The crisp air, the cool nights, and of course, the seasonal lattes.

And as your trusted destination for all things home, Wayfair's got everything you need to cosify your space, from comfy recliners to warm bedding and autumn decor.

Wayfair even has espresso makers, so you can make that latte at home.

You know the one.

Head to Wayfair.com today to shop curated collections of easy, affordable fall updates.

That's w-ay-y-f-a-ir-r.com.

Wayfair, every style, every home.