Uncluttering Your Online Life

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Started 11 months ago by themusiclivez
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themusiclivez
Member

I am in the process of removing any and all information that shows up in a Google search about me. I found that my name was showing up in LinkedIn (I've never joined), Pipl.com (never joined) and now Spoke.com (also, never joined). I have contacted the first two sites and asked them to remove my name from their database. They actually complied! I have a request in with the last company now and hope they comply as well.

I have also been really elitist about who I give my email address to as well as who I register with online. It seems that every company/organization wants you to set up a "profile" with them for everything!

Are any of you trying to declutter your online lives?

Posted 11 months ago #
JuliaJayne
Member

I did it a couple of years ago, but I need to do it again.

Posted 11 months ago #
ninakk
Member

When DH and I got married, I changed my name and luckily there's plenty more of people sharing my name now. Previously way too few for me to feel secure about it.

Currently, I'm trying to go through all my crap email addresses and delete user accounts plus the email accounts themselves. There's plenty of those from many active years in cyberspace. *sigh*

I'm not in love with the idea of iCloud but am looking into buying an iPhone all the same, on one of those 12-month payment programs where you're tied to the service provider as well as still in debt to them for the phone. DH's phone has started acting up even though it's less than a year old and although he'd get a new one from work (he uses his own phone right now) I still cringe inside from the idea of yet another unitasker (I don't use my mobile for anything else serious but calling) that will die on me. So cluttered iCloud it is, but less pieces of equipment :) More syncing though.

Posted 11 months ago #
lottielot
Member

For buying most stuff, I have a 'spam' email address which I just check occasionally and ignore most of. My name is so common a friend overseas tried to find me for 10 years without success! And my dh was permanently cluttering up our joint email addy with rubbish, so I made my own addy just for friends, completely spam-free :)

Posted 11 months ago #
Lori Paximadis
Member

I'm easy to find online, but it doesn't bother me. As for uncluttering my online life, though, one of the big projects on my list is changing ALL of my e-mail subscriptions, signup names, and such to an address I set up specifically to receive that kind of thing. I want to try to clear everything except the essentials out of my "good" inbox, especially because I'm checking it more and more on my iPhone, and I hate having to scroll through a bunch of stuff to get to the messages I want to read, if that makes sense.

Posted 11 months ago #
klutzgrrl
Member

I work online under my real name, and am required to do social networking as part of that, so it's a bit of a nightmare at times. I usually have tried to keep my location private, due to a creepy stalker I had a few years back, but I'm pretty sure it's easily find-able now.

The most problematic things for me have been when sites like Yahoo have taken over other sites like Flickr and somehow my accounts and identities ended up merged - when I've been using a separate account to maintain some privacy. That's really annoying.

It can also be really hard to delete accounts. And on lots of blogs you can't delete comments, which is a problem if like me, you love to add your 2c!

Posted 11 months ago #
Rosa
Member

Klutzgrrl - exactly the same situation. I had a separate Flickr account for public stuff (job events, mostly) and one for private, and then they merged everything & i had to take it all down!

Posted 11 months ago #
themusiclivez
Member

It just seems that every time I unclutter one thing, another pops up, or another site makes me "sign up" to make a purchase. I have really tried shopping at just a few places (like eBay and amazon) to prevent having my information be all over the place! I wish I had been more careful when I started using the internet so much, but I didn't really think much of it until recently!

Posted 11 months ago #

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