I tried to delete myself from the Internet. Here’s what I learned
By Seth Fiegerman, CNN Business
(CNN Business)It was MyLife that broke me. After spending hours studying FAQ pages, sending terse emails and making occasional phone calls in an earnest-if-naive attempt to take back some control of my personal information online, I had my first demoralizing moment.MyLife pulls together vast amounts of public data to create background reports and “reputation scores” on millions of people in the US, all available to those willing to pay for a monthly membership.On it, I found a sometimes inaccurate but eerie amount of personal information about, well, my life: my birthday and home city; my previous job title (though curiously not my current one); a list of people “Seth maintains relationships with,” including the names of both my parents, each linked to their own profile pages with still more data. All there in one place waiting to be discovered.When I called the site, a customer service representative stressed that the information doesn’t come from MyLife, but rather from across the “interwebs.”Following some back and forth, the representative agreed to delete my profile page. I felt victorious — until two hours later when I received the first of many promotional emails from the company, one encouraging me to sign up for a membership, another talking about raising my credit score.As I would learn through my brief, manic campaign in December to scrub as much of my personal data as possible and start the new year with a clean digital slate, it’s hard not to feel like you’re just scratching the surface of an impossibly large data industrial complex. By the end of my experiment, I felt even worse off about my ability to wrestle back control of my data than when I started.
More: https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/21/tech/deleting-personal-data-online/index.html
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