The digital footprint tower · the atrium

Digital footprint: the tower, floor by floor

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 far better than most people expect once you know which form goes where. The floors keep those two jobs on separate wings.

One expectation is worth adjusting before you start. Nothing here deletes you from the internet, because no such button exists and anybody selling one is selling something else. What these floors do is considerably more useful: they 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 tower 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, it is a different one, and it has its own wing with its own order of operations.

Three levels, and you are on the first. The atrium lists the floors; each floor covers one subject completely and holds the shorter guides underneath. Nothing here is more than three clicks from the front door.

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 wing 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.

What this tower will not do

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 are honest about which is which.

It will not carry affiliate links to removal services. Those subscriptions pay unusually well for a recommendation, which is exactly why the floor about them has 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 named on these floors points 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.