Can You Really Disappear Online?

Summary

The Wirecutter Show: Can You Really Disappear Online?

Release Date: June 25, 2025

In the latest episode of The Wirecutter Show, hosted by Christine Cyr Clisset and Kyra Blackwell, the focus shifts to a pressing modern concern: how to erase your presence from the internet. With the digital footprint expanding exponentially, the episode delves into the feasibility, strategies, and emotional ramifications of attempting to vanish online. The duo engages in a candid conversation with Max Eddy, Wirecutter’s expert on privacy, security, and software, who undertook a comprehensive personal project to minimize his digital footprint.

---

Unveiling the Digital Footprint

The episode opens with Christine and Kyra discussing their own online presences. Christine shares her surprise at discovering extensive personal information about her family online despite efforts to remain guarded. Kyra admits to maintaining a substantial online presence, regularly monitoring her information through Google searches.

Kyra Blackwell (01:37):
"I Google myself constantly to make sure that my efforts are not in vain."

This mutual revelation sets the stage for exploring the broader implications of data privacy and the challenges inherent in managing one’s digital identity.

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Max Eddy’s Mission to Disappear

Christine introduces Max Eddy, who shares his ambitious project to erase himself from the internet—a task seemingly insurmountable for someone with an extensive online footprint as a journalist.

Max Eddy (05:19):
"If I can't disappear, then maybe I can get control and try to take control of as much of it as I could."

Max emphasizes that complete disappearance is a "fantasy," but significant reduction is achievable through deliberate actions. His journey becomes a case study for listeners seeking to reclaim their privacy.

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Strategies for Reducing Online Presence

Max outlines a three-pronged approach to diminishing his online footprint:

1. Google Search Results Suppression
   Max utilized Google’s "Results About You" tool to limit personal information from appearing in search results. While this tool can suppress sensitive data, it does not remove it entirely from the web.

   Max Eddy (13:31):
   "The 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."

2. Managing Social Media Accounts
   Instead of deleting his social media accounts entirely, Max opted to maintain them in an inactive state. He replaced personal photos with randomly generated images and used email masking services to prevent data brokers from aggregating his information.

   Max Eddy (22:13):
   "I created what the experts call synthetic data... all of the pictures are different. You're not going to be able to put them together and say, like, look, same user photos here and here."

3. Addressing Public Records
   Tackling public records proved to be the most challenging aspect, as many records are maintained by law and cannot be easily removed. Max advises understanding local laws to explore any available options for redaction or removal.

   Max Eddy (31:27):
   "Removing public records is really difficult because the existence of their record is usually required by law."

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Dealing with Data Brokers

A significant portion of the discussion centers on data brokers—entities that collect, compile, and sell personal information. Max explains how data brokers aggregate data from various sources, creating detailed profiles that can be difficult to dismantle.

Max Eddy (14:29):
"Data brokers gather personal information and then sell it... they can assemble some pretty specific dossiers on individuals."

To combat this, Max employed data removal services, which handle the tedious process of sending opt-out requests to multiple data brokers on behalf of individuals. He highlights the varying costs and effectiveness of these services, noting the persistent challenge of data brokers relisting information even after removal.

Max Eddy (17:32):
"The cost of a data removal service is wide ranging. On the low end I found one for $20 a year... but you are going to have to do some Googling."

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Emotional and Practical Impacts

Max candidly shares the emotional toll of his project. Initially, deleting posts felt like watching his life flash before his eyes, but as more personal memories vanished, it became a source of distress.

Max Eddy (29:54):
"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."

Despite the technical strategies, the process is not merely mechanical—it involves confronting past actions and personal growth. Christine and Kyra relate to these feelings, acknowledging the difficulty of balancing online presence with privacy.

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Practical Takeaways for Listeners

Max provides simplified steps for those looking to reduce their online footprint:

1. Use Google's Tool:
   Utilize Google’s “Results About You” tool to suppress personal search results.

2. Audit and Clean Social Media Accounts:
   Decide whether to delete or deactivate accounts. If deactivating, replace personal information with synthetic data and use email masking services.

3. Engage with Data Removal Services:
   Consider using reputable services to handle data broker opt-outs, balancing cost with desired effectiveness.

4. Monitor Accounts with Tools Like “Have I Been Pwned?”:
   Regularly check for data breaches to stay informed about personal information exposure.

Christine Cyr Clisset (32:14):
"You can read about my experiences doing that."

Max encourages proactive management, emphasizing that while complete disappearance is unattainable, significant control over one’s digital presence is possible with deliberate effort.

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Conclusion: Balancing Privacy and Connectivity

The episode wraps up with reflections on the balance between maintaining privacy and the human desire to connect and share life online. While tools and strategies exist to mitigate online exposure, the emotional challenges and ongoing efforts required underscore the complexity of truly "disappearing" online.

Christine Cyr Clisset (34:03):
"A lot of the information that I was so proud to have about myself online, like, people are making money off of that. So that's not great."

Listeners are encouraged to take small, manageable steps towards controlling their digital footprint, leveraging the tools and insights discussed by Max to navigate the intricate landscape of online privacy.

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For more information on Wirecutter’s coverage or to explore products and services mentioned in this episode, visit nytimes.com/wirecutter or check the show notes for direct links.

Transcript

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[Kyra Blackwell]

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

[Max Eddy]

Oh, easily 200 LiveJournal posts. That was. Yeah, without question.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

And those are like diary entries, essentially.

[Max Eddy]

We're not talking about the content today.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

I'm Christine Cyrclassette.

[Kyra Blackwell]

I'm Kyra Blackwell.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

I'm Rosie Garant and you're listening to the Wirecutter Show.

[Kyra Blackwell]

This episode is called can youn really Disappear Online? Hi.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

Rah.

[Kyra Blackwell]

Hi.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

It's just us today.

[Kyra Blackwell]

I know. It feels so weird.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

Rosie is out again, so I thought this would be a great opportunity. There's a. There's a vast difference, difference in age between you and me. Okay. And I'm gonna ask you a very Gen Xer asks a Gen Z er a question. Okay. How much of your life is online? Like, what's your footprint online?

[Kyra Blackwell]

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.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

Like, what? What is it? How many search page results are actually about you?

[Kyra Blackwell]

All of them.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

Okay.

[Kyra Blackwell]

It helps that I have a really nice uni, but yeah, it's all me.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

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.

[Kyra Blackwell]

A lot of you? Yeah.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

Like, it's kind of creepy. There was information about my parents and about my sibling and about old addresses, and that is creepy.

[Kyra Blackwell]

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.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

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 Eddie, 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.

[Kyra Blackwell]

Wow, big task.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

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

[Kyra Blackwell]

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 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.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

So creepy.

[Kyra Blackwell]

A lot of good information.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

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. Foreign.

[Kyra Blackwell]

The Wirecutter show is supported by Intuit QuickBooks. Do you own a business that's ready to thrive? It's time to let Intuit QuickBooks take things like unpaid invoices and tracking expenses off your plate so you can take things to the next level. QuickBooks is an all in one business solution that can help with those day to day tasks like invoicing and expenses. Manage and grow your business all in one place. Intuit QuickBooks your way to money. Get 90% off for 3 months, limited time only. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back. Today we're talking with Max Eddy who is Wirecutter's writer 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.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

Welcome to the show, Max.

[Max Eddy]

Great to be back.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

It's great to have you here. Today we're gonna 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?

[Max Eddy]

So, as you just said, I. 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.

[Kyra Blackwell]

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 media accounts and other info about yourself on the Internet?

[Max Eddy]

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 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 know, 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.

[Kyra Blackwell]

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?

[Max Eddy]

Oh, easily 200 LiveJournal posts. That was. Yeah, without question.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

And those are, like, diary entries, essentially.

[Max Eddy]

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.

[Kyra Blackwell]

That's a lot.

[Max Eddy]

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 gonna find a lot about yourself that you've forgotten about and you will definitely notice that you're not the same person anymore.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

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 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?

[Max Eddy]

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 on to Google and I put in my name and I looked around at what was there, 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.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

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.

[Max Eddy]

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. And 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.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

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?

[Max Eddy]

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.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

Okay.

[Max Eddy]

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

[Christine Cyrclassette]

It's.

[Max Eddy]

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.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

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

[Max Eddy]

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 scrabbled 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?

[Kyra Blackwell]

Is have I been Pwned? Do you have to pay for that?

[Max Eddy]

It is free.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

Is that specifically a site that helps find data breaches?

[Max Eddy]

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. 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. 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.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

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

[Max Eddy]

I should probably spell that. Then it's have I been pwned? Pwned. Which is great to write out, but terrible to say out loud.

[Kyra Blackwell]

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?

[Max Eddy]

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 suppress. 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.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

Can you explain what a data broker is? They basically are like vacuuming up all of your information and selling it.

[Max Eddy]

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 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.

[Kyra Blackwell]

What are some companies that people might be able to recognize? Do you have any examples?

[Max Eddy]

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. Alabama court records.us newengland facts.com white pages.com and, and again, you know, 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.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

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?

[Max Eddy]

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 skeezed 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.

[Kyra Blackwell]

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.

[Max Eddy]

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.

[Kyra Blackwell]

Well, I'm happy for that actually.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

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 diy.

[Max Eddy]

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 bucks.

[Kyra Blackwell]

And how successful have you found these services to be?

[Max Eddy]

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 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. That sometimes data brokers will relist your information even after it's been taken down.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

It's like a whack a mole situation.

[Max Eddy]

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.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

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.

[Max Eddy]

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?

[Christine Cyrclassette]

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.

[Max Eddy]

Sure. So. 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 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.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

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

[Max Eddy]

Absolutely.

[Kyra Blackwell]

Awesome. Okay, so we're gonna take a quick break, and then when we're back, Max is gonna 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.

[Sam Sanders]

This podcast is supported by the Sam Sanders show from kcrw. Should the Oscars even exist? Have streaming apps made music bad? Can pop culture predict a recession? Each week, Sam and his guests ask big questions and offer hot takes about the entertainment we're obsessed with. Join comedians, journalists, and celebrities as they make sense of the zeitgeist, or at least make fun of it. Catch the Sam Sanders show wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.

[Kyra Blackwell]

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'd you go about doing that?

[Max Eddy]

So. So 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 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 googleable person, and I didn't want someone else popping up 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.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

Oh, my gosh.

[Kyra Blackwell]

That happens so much on Facebook. I feel like I hear that all the time.

[Max Eddy]

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, 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. It's all in there. So you can't just delete your email address and then hit save and like Twitter 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 the background that'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 requests. 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.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

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? Absolutely. Because like, if I started a unique email for everything that I have, that would be in big locked out.

[Max Eddy]

Yeah, I have 356 online accounts and, and I worked on 55 of them for this. So yeah, I had like generated 55 unique emails for this project.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

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

[Max Eddy]

So the downside of like a lot of masked emails is that they are like random text and it's like, oh, yeah, you can just hit me up at x123q57ozmail.com it's like the old version.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

Of dating and people being like, can I get your number? And you're like, yeah, and it's like six digits.

[Max Eddy]

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, like, 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, but 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 via email either. So every piece of it that should have been searchable, I tried to make unique.

[Kyra Blackwell]

Do you suggest that, like, everybody does all of this?

[Max Eddy]

No.

[Kyra Blackwell]

Okay, okay.

[Max Eddy]

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.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

I. I don't know, like to get a 20% off coupon or something.

[Max Eddy]

Oh, yeah. Oh yeah, 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. 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 that you care about would recognize, but for other things, you don't need to do that.

[Kyra Blackwell]

So how long did this take?

[Max Eddy]

The whole project was over the course of about three weeks or so. For the social media accounts, al 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 one what posts are available. So I had to find other ways to do this. So in the case of LiveJournal 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 stands for claw back 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.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

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 you yourself kind of disappear from these places, what did that feel like?

[Max Eddy]

It was awful. I can only say what. How it felt for me, I don't know what other people would experience. But, you know, at first it was really fun. Cause it was like, oh, look at all this stuff. It's just like flying by. You see it for like a. 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, oh, 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.

[Kyra Blackwell]

I had no problem deleting my Facebook account.

[Max Eddy]

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. Of privacy and control reasons. Like, some of it was just hard for me personally.

[Kyra Blackwell]

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?

[Max Eddy]

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

[Christine Cyrclassette]

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

[Max Eddy]

Yeah, you can read about my experiences doing that.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

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.

[Max Eddy]

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

[Kyra Blackwell]

Before we wrap, we usually ask our guests one final question. What's the last thing you bought that you've really loved?

[Max Eddy]

Kobo Libra Color. It's an E reader, and I'm a sucker for E ink.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

So why do you like this better than a Kindle?

[Max Eddy]

I broke up with Amazon many, many years ago.

[Kyra Blackwell]

Okay, good for you.

[Max Eddy]

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.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

Well, thank you so much, Max. I feel like I learned a ton this episode.

[Kyra Blackwell]

Yeah.

[Max Eddy]

Thank you. Happy to be here.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

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

[Kyra Blackwell]

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.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

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

[Kyra Blackwell]

Yay.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

What was your biggest takeaway?

[Kyra Blackwell]

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.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

Yeah.

[Kyra Blackwell]

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.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

Right.

[Kyra Blackwell]

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.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

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, 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.

[Kyra Blackwell]

I like it.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

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 dot privacy pieces that we had come out this week, go to nytimes.com 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.

[Kyra Blackwell]

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 Katherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marian Lozano, Alicia, Ben Etoupe and Diane Wong. Wirecutter's deputy publisher is Cliff Levy. Ben Fruman is Wirecutter's editor in chief. I'm Kyra Blackwell.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

I'm Christine Cyrclassette.

[Kyra Blackwell]

Thanks for listening. And you have to be my accountability buddy.

[Christine Cyrclassette]

Your accountability buddy? Yeah, I will. Totally.

[Kyra Blackwell]

Accountability buddy, Christine, you gotta make it one word.

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