It doesn’t need to be said at this point, but the internet is overwhelming. We’re hit with more news than we could ever bring ourselves to care about; every week brings another hero or villain that’s exciting or angering social media; and, in general, logging on every morning feels like it induces more headaches than pleasure.
Given this, it’s no surprise that a sort of “return to tradition” mentality has recently gripped the web. Sure, many of these people couldn’t last a day without Twitter and their Nintendo Switch, but at least in theory, the idea of “logging off forever” is beginning to sound appealing for those who want to start anew and leave the digital world behind.
Doing so, though, isn’t easy. What makes it even harder is that many people, myself included, are idiots. That’s why we turned to a professional disappearance expert to see how exactly we can begin to remove ourselves from the internet and break free from the chains that we’ve voluntarily put ourselves in.
Frank Ahearn is a privacy professional with over 30 years of experience. Back in 2010, he published the book How to Disappear: Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails and Vanish Without A Trace, and in the years since, he’s advised folks all around the world on how to stop blackmail, prevent exposure, and as it relates to us, disappear from the internet.
When somebody hears that a person wants to disappear, they might think that they’re a criminal, or that they’re escaping something bad. In your experience, what are some of the reasons that people choose to disappear?
People typically “go” because of money, violence or starting over. Those are pretty much the main three reasons. Somebody could be a victim of a stalker, somebody could come into money and just want to live their life and not have the world catch up with them. Some people just might realize, “I’m tired of society, and I don’t need the digital aspect.”
I would say less criminals disappear than more. Take these finance guys who always rip off companies — they never disappear. Very few of them actually go; they just wait for the walls to come tumbling down.
Have you seen the reasons for people disappearing change over the years?
When people contact me, my big thing is, “Why do you want to go right now?” And at first, people were like, “Look, I’m just tired of this. I just want to remove myself online,” like, opt out of the digital life to a degree. At first, I thought it was just bullshit. They probably committed some sort of crime, and they were lying to me. But as time went on, I would just get more and more people who said, “I was involved in the digital world,” or “There’s some information about me, and I just don’t want that to be who I am.”
In a weird sort of way, we have two selves: we have the physical self, and we have the digital self — and some people have become more so the digital self than the physical self. There’s almost like a reclamation, where people are just reclaiming their humanity.
So if you’re trying to delete your online presence entirely, where do you start?
We’re beyond the point that deleting our online information is really helpful, because it depends on who’s looking for you. Hypothetically, let’s say if a store is looking for you, they already have all your information so deleting it does nothing. But what you should do is, at some point, just shut everything down. Get rid of social media, opt out of databases and get rid of identifiable stuff.
Those in your family on Facebook are a problem. When you’re looking for someone, you’re not looking for them; you’re actually looking for the information they left behind, because that information will lead typically to where they went. And the problem with social media is, it’s not so much what you did, but it’s also what other people did. You were at so-and-so’s picnic. You made a comment on a travel blog about how much you love Belarus that you can’t remove. You clean that as best as possible, but it’s not the be-all, end-all to everything.
When people realize they’re gonna disappear, all of a sudden they become privacy conscious, and they’ve forgotten everything they’ve done for the 10 years prior — their phone records, their credit card payments to the hotel in Belarus and things like that. The internet is only part of it, and there’s a big fear that, “Oh my God, this information out there, they’re gonna find me.” And that’s not necessarily true.
If you’re picking up and splitting, what’s more important is looking at your information and saying, “Is there any information I’ve posted, or somebody posted about me, that’s connected to the place that I’m going? That’s more important than deleting it.”
Is there any value in creating false leads online? For example, fake accounts under your own name or a slightly different name with misleading content?
It really comes down to who’s looking for you. The problem is, the average person doesn’t have the sophistication to create foolproof disinformation. Some tech savvy 15-year-old kid looks at something, and they can just rip it apart. I mean, if you’re capable of creating disinformation properly, sure, you can do it, but most people don’t have that ability.
I guess the conclusion that it feels fair to come to is, you shouldn’t think of it as deleting your previous trails, but simply not making new ones.
Right. Listen, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with contacting websites and requesting that they take something down. Just saying, “Look, man, I wrote some stupid stuff. Any way I can remove it?” At least asking, it can’t hurt.
We're also learning to live with our digital mistakes. Younger people are more sophisticated when it comes to social media, whereas you take people who are in their 40s and above — and it’s gonna sound kind of weird, but they’re, like, the assholes of social media. As the younger generation comes along, they’re gonna realize there’s so much shit out there that it doesn’t make a difference.
If you’re not in danger, and you want to delete what you can, that’s great; and then just leave whatever’s out there. It makes no difference, because eventually, that stuff dies on page 28 of Google.
This is a left turn, but in your book, you talk about why faking your death is a bad idea. Can you explain that?
Well, because number one, you can’t dispose of your body. What happens is, most people do it by water. In the early days, law enforcement didn’t catch on to that — somebody’s wallet and shoes and shirt are by the beach, they assume they drown. That was an easy assumption. But now, if you drown, they’re not just issuing a death certificate without the body. It doesn’t work like that anymore.
Law enforcement has become sophisticated. So have insurance companies. It’s just suspect, is what it is. Not only that, but you can always look at somebody’s life, like, five days prior to them faking their death, and they’ve created so many mistakes with what they were doing — they’ve doubled up on getting their pharmaceuticals, they pulled a bunch of cash from the bank, they’re buying burner phones.
Sometimes, you’ve just got to do nothing and just disappear. Just walk out the fucking door and go.
I know every situation is different, and it feels unfair to ask this given that there are so many circumstances that could change the answer — but would you recommend disappearing?
I can answer that really in a nutshell — disappearing doesn’t always solve your problem, and sometimes, it can make matters worse.
And it’s not easy. I lived in Europe for eight years, and I lived in different cities. Even in the best of circumstances, it’s not always easy to acclimate and become a part of a community you don’t know. Most people can’t do it. So, I don’t think most people should disappear, unless their life is in danger.
Comments