Footprint · guides

Digital footprint: what is public, and how to take it down

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated 10 September 2026 · 6 min read

This is the entrance to the digital footprint tower — everything about you that is findable by somebody who decides to look, and the routes for taking parts of it down.

The work here divides cleanly in two, and mixing them is why people give up. The first half is finding out what is actually public, which is uncomfortable and takes an afternoon. The second half is removal, which is slow, partly bureaucratic, and works better than its reputation once you know which form goes where. The two jobs stay on separate wings here, because mixing them is what makes the work feel endless.

One expectation is worth adjusting before you start. Some of it does come back under your control — what a chatbot keeps of your conversations has a switch and a deletion route. But nothing here deletes you from the internet, because no such button exists and anybody selling one is selling something else. What those floors will do is considerably more useful: they will remove specific things from the specific places where people actually look, which for almost everybody means the first page of a search for their own name.

The plan also holds the emergency case. Doxxing — somebody deliberately publishing your address, workplace or phone number to direct harassment at you — is not a slower version of this problem but a different one, with its own order of operations. Nothing here covers it yet, and this page says so rather than pointing at a door that is not there. Two neighbouring emergencies do have pages: somebody threatening to publish private photographs is blackmail, where the first hour has a fixed order and a free removal route; and what a published phone number does and does not allow is a shorter list than it looks.

The floors below that carry a link are open and can be read now; the one marked as being built is not there yet. Three guides do part of this work today: deleting what a chatbot has kept of your conversations, closing a Gmail account without losing the Google account behind it, and deleting a Facebook Page, and the fourteen days it takes. For the rest — the brokers, the search removals, the doxxing sequence — this page is a plan, and says so.

It is worth being clear about who benefits most from this building, because the answer is not the people who worry about it most. The readers who get the largest return from an afternoon here are the ones with a specific event coming: a job search, a new role that puts their name in public, a move away from somebody they do not want to be found by. For them the audit is not an anxious exercise, it is preparation, and the removals that follow are targeted at a handful of results rather than at the whole internet. For everybody else the honest advice is smaller and more cheerful: close the old accounts, tidy the first page of your own name, and stop there, because the remaining work has a poor return and no end.

Not covered here. It will not promise to erase you. That promise is the entire sales pitch of the removal industry and it is not achievable; what is achievable is specific, worthwhile and mostly free, and the floors will be honest about which is which.

It will not carry affiliate links to removal services. Those subscriptions pay well for a recommendation, which is exactly why the floor about them will have to be written by somebody with nothing to gain from the answer.

And it will not tell somebody being harassed to make their profile private and hope. That advice is common, it is useless once the details are already published, and the hostile wing starts from the assumption that the reader is past that point and needs a sequence rather than a tip.

On sourcing: every removal route those floors name will point at the form or the policy page that operates it, with the date we read it. These processes change often and quietly, and a guide that describes a form which no longer exists wastes an afternoon of somebody’s time at the worst possible moment. What holds instead is simple: most of the work in this tower is free, slow and permanent, and no floor here carries an affiliate link of any kind.