I think that having your name, address, and personal info accessible on the Internet is very dangerous. You have the possibility of identity theft, and all kinds of financial mischief-because of the easy access to your personal data. My question: are there services that will remove your data (and block access to your SS number, banks accounts, etc.)? Can you actually “disappear” from databases?
I think identity protection will be a huge industry-are there any investment opportunities in this?
I’m not an expert, but I would assume that once that information is out there, it mostly resides on databases of private servers. It wouldn’t be easy, and certainly not legal, to go in and erase the data.
In the broader sense, I agree with you; it would be great to have a way to wipe that info away from the public. But I don’t think there is.
You exist in thousands of separate databases and some of them are public records. There is no way to get yourself deleted from a significant fraction of them. It is a hopeless situation and will get worse from your viewpoint as time goes by. The best thing you can do is to be careful what information you share online and what websites you register for.
I’ve archived this post in a database. Try to delete it.