After having spent many years on social networks, maybe you’re tired and bored. You just realised that you don’t really need social networks in your professional life and to keep contact with your friends neither. So how can you get rid of social networks easily, The Circular is giving you a little guide to do it quickly:
We are going to call this operation “The Big Four”, it regroups the main application everyone uses, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. Those platforms are the easiest way to collect pieces of information about you.
1. Disappear on Facebook:
Facebook is making the deactivation really obvious to do. You have to go to Account Settings > Security > Deactivate your account. Of course, don’t be naive, Facebook will always keep a part of contents which concerns you, per example, conversations and pictures.
To really destroy every piece of content concerning you, you have to head to Delete My Account page and click the big blue button.
If you’re a bit nostalgic and you want to keep a trace of what you’ve done on Facebook you can also go to Account Settings > General > Download a copy of your Facebook Data > Start My Archive.
2. Erase your Twitter account
Unlike Facebook, deactivation on Twitter means that you will definitely erase everything concerning you. It’s much easier to do: Account Settings > Deactivate My Account > Okay, fine, deactivate my account. You will probably have to enter again your username and password and that’s it. For a question of policies, Twitter’s servers will keep information about you during only 30 days, just in case you made a mistake and want to come back. After those 30 days, no one will never remember that you were on Twitter.
3. Leave LinkedIn
This deactivation might be the easiest one. You just have to go to the upper right hand of the page and click on Privacy & Settings from the drop-down menu. Then go Account > Close your Account. LinkedIn will ask you few questions to understand why are you leaving their platform. Before leaving you should proceed to the last check-up of your account and then validate.
Keep in mind, that LinkedIn as Facebook have different policies and are able to keep pieces of information about you during few months until the amount of research concerning you reach the 0% level. It can take month or year, it depends.
4. How to get rid of Google +
That’s a much more complicated task. There’s a lot of chance you’re a Google+ user without knowing it, that’s most of the time what happened with Google. You were just surfing on Internet a few month ago and subscribing an account on a website made you create a Google+ account.
The most important part of this process, supposing that you have a Gmail account or Google Drive account, is to delete your Google+ account without deleting all your Google’s accounts. So head to Account Managment > Delete Profile and Remove Related Google+ Features > Delete Google+ Content.
To get rid of your entire Google+ Account, meanwhile, repeat the process but select Delete your entire Google Profile. It sounds like you deleted everything, but in fact no. You’ll still be able to use Gmail, Drive, etc… It will just nuke your all presence on Google+.
Once you’ve done all that, you’ve erased “THE BIG FOUR”, you can still go further. You want to erase your smaller and older accounts? But of course, you don’t remember all of them because no-ones keep notes or traces of what he/she has done on the Internet. Here are some great tools which will help you to erase more of your data on the Internet:
- Account Killer references all the direct links to deletion’s page on pretty much all the website on earth.
- Just Delete ME is a Chrome Extension which will tell you in real time when you’re going on a website if you’ve subscribed an account one day.
- Knowem is referencing more than 500 websites, including many social networks.
After all these tips if you still can’t find your way to erase yourself online, the reason might be that you’re not ready yet.
If you know any other tricks to reach all those steps of deleting accounts, propose them to TheCircular by commenting below.