Yes, we've imagined it more than once: following our lives without a digital presence. Goodbye to social networks, forgotten accounts, abandoned user profiles, and a long etcetera. The problem is that the people responsible for all those services make it very difficult (and sometimes impossible) to close accounts, unless we get a little help. That's when Deseat.me comes to the rescue, a new service that analyzes all our remnants using a Google account and provides links to get rid of them.
All basic security guides recommend using a different password for each service, but the email address is reused across all of them. As expected, your email is not stored privately and anonymously, but it ends up on a list, either because the service was attacked or because the terms of use allow it. Accounts are left abandoned, and you wonder every day where that spam comes from that flows like a river. The point is that our footprint on the web is bigger than we imagine. Personally, I've signed up for dozens of portals only to use them once or twice, and I forget about them shortly after. Digital garbage accumulates; however, there are some mechanisms that help eliminate it. Deseat.me is one of them.
How Deseat.me works
Deseat.me works with a Google account, so you'll need to grant the necessary permissions for the portal to analyze your address and search for it in its databases. Within seconds it will show all the references it found, and from there you'll indicate which accounts you're interested in deleting and which you prefer to keep. Now, Deseat.me also detects old references, meaning it can't know whether an account has already been deleted or not. An example from my evaluation was Tumblr: Deseat.me found registration information in my email, but the account was closed years ago.
The real challenge of Deseat.me is twofold. On one hand, its level of automation when deleting accounts is zero, meaning you'll have to check and delete each account manually. On the other hand, there are many portals and services about which Deseat.me has no information. This is a work in progress, and a little patience is required. In short, Deseat.me is not ideal for removing our presence from the web, but it's moving in the right direction.
Click here.
