If endless cyber attack scare stories, viral fake news
articles, online abuse and the election of Donald Trump have given yourself the
resolve to walk away from the internet, you're in luck.
Developers in Sweden have created a website that can help
you delete your online presence with just a few clicks.
Available at Deseat.me, Wille Dahlbo and Linus Unnebäck designed
the internet deletion site as a place for people to "clean up your
internet presence".
The service lets you see all of the websites you're signed
up to or have accounts for and asks if you'd like to delete them or
unsubscribe. It asks for your email address and password so it can scan for the
sites you're signed up to.
High profile hacks
In the last two years alone, hackers have wreaked havoc on:
Yahoo (2013):
Details of 1 billion accounts stolen in the largest data
breach on record
eBay (2014):
eBay asked 145m users to change passwords after hackers
stole customers' names, addresses, and dates of birth
Heartbleed (2014):
A serious vulnerability was discovered in encryption
technology used to protect many of the world’s major websites, leaving them
vulnerable to data theft
Sony (2014):
A cyber attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment leaked the
private details of 47,000 employees and actors
Yahoo (2014):
Details of 500 million user accounts were stolen by “a
state-sponsored actor”, although they have yet to be made public
US Central Command
(2015):
Hackers claiming links to Isil managed to take control of
CentCom’s Twitter and YouTube accounts, changing the logo to an image of a
hooded fighter
Ashley Madison
(2015):
Hackers threatened to publish the names of up to 37m
AshleyMadison.com customers - a dating website for adulterous affairs
Talk Talk (2015):
Almost 157,000 customers' personal details were accessed
when hackers targeted TalkTalk’s website, stealing 15,656 bank account numbers,
sort codes, and obscured credit card details
MySpace (2016):
360m passwords and email addresses, believed to have been stolen
several years before, were listed on a hidden internet marketplace on the dark
web
Dahlbo and Unnebäck said they take the privacy of users
seriously and that the program runs on the user's computer, rather than their
servers.
"So basically the only thing you're telling us is what
accounts you want to delete. That's it," they said. The website uses
Google's security protocol, which means it doesn't gain access to users' log in
information, they added.
Deseat.me is fairly limited at the moment. It requires users to have a Google email address that is used for all of your online accounts. So for those ancient MySpace and Bebo accounts that you signed up for with a Hotmail address you'll need to go to the websites yourself and delete your account.
It also hasn't managed to retrieve account deletion
information from every service yet so some appear with a greyed out delete
button. And it may never work for smaller sites. That said, it does already
work with most major websites that users would be likely to have accounts with,
such as Facebook, Twitter and Evernote.
How to delete
yourself from the internet
- Go to deseat.me
- Sign in with a Google email address
- Go through the list of websites you're signed up to and decide whether you want to "delete", "add to delete queue" or "keep"
- If you have more sites associated with other accounts that you'd like to delete, you will need to visit these individually and follow their instructions
