The Uncomfortable Start
I will be honest, the whole reason I started this project was vanity. I was applying for a new job and wanted to check what a potential employer would see if they Googled my name. That was the only reason. I was not on some noble quest for digital privacy. I was worried about making a bad first impression.
So I opened an incognito window in Chrome one Saturday morning, typed in my full name in quotes, and hit enter.
What came back made me close the laptop for a good twenty minutes before I could look again. My phone number was listed on three different directory websites I had never signed up for. There was an old Quora answer I had written in 2017 about a topic I no longer agree with at all, and it was the fourth search result for my name. A photograph of me at a college cultural festival I barely remembered attending was sitting on some event aggregation website that looked like it had not been updated since 2016. My LinkedIn showed up, which I expected, but so did a second LinkedIn profile from years ago that I thought I had deleted but apparently had only deactivated. A comment I had left on a Times of India article using my real name, my real city, and my actual opinion on a political topic was sitting right there on the first page of results.
I felt exposed. Not because any single piece of information was dangerous on its own, but because all of it together painted a very complete picture of who I was, where I lived, what I did for work, and what I thought about things. And I had not consented to any of it being that easy to find.
That Saturday morning turned into a three-week project. And then the three weeks turned into something I am still doing, off and on, months later.
The Google Results
The first thing I did after recovering from the initial shock was to be more systematic about it. I searched for my full name in quotes. Then my name plus my city. My name plus my company. Then just my phone number in quotes. Then each of my email addresses. Then old usernames I had used on forums and gaming platforms back in college.
The results kept getting worse.
I found a product review I had written on an e-commerce site that does not even function properly anymore but still has cached pages indexed by Google. There was a comment I had posted on a cricket blog in 2015 where I had used my real name and mentioned my neighbourhood. An old resume I had apparently uploaded to a job portal in 2016 was available as a PDF. My resume. With my phone number, my home address at the time, and my date of birth. Just sitting there. For seven years.
After the Google search, I went to haveibeenpwned.com and plugged in every email address I had ever used. My college email address had been involved in four separate data breaches. Four. I had not used that email in years, but the accounts attached to it were still active on various platforms. The passwords on those accounts were ones I had almost certainly reused on other services back when I did not know better. That was a bad feeling.
I checked Truecaller next. Even though I have never installed the Truecaller app on any of my phones, my number was there with my full name and a label that read "Spam." Wonderful. Turns out, if anyone in your contact list uses Truecaller, the app uploads their entire address book to its servers, and your number goes into the database. You can request removal at truecaller.com/unlisting, but I have read accounts from people saying their number reappeared months later after a contact re-synced. There may not be a permanent solution for that.
The last thing I tried was a reverse image search on Google Images. I uploaded my current profile photo. It appeared on two websites I had no idea existed, including what looked like a scraped profile directory. That was unsettling enough to make me change my profile photo to something less identifiable.
Week One: Deleting Old Accounts
I opened Gmail and searched for "welcome to," "verify your email," "thank you for signing up," and "confirm your account." The number of accounts I had created over the past decade was staggering. Shopping sites from flash sales I do not remember. A fitness tracking app I used for exactly one week in January 2020 before giving up. Three different travel portals. A food blog platform I apparently joined. Two different stock market discussion forums. An astrology app, of all things.
What I learned very quickly is that deleting accounts is made difficult by design.
Some platforms bury the account deletion option four or five levels deep in their settings menus. Others only offer "deactivation," which hides your profile from public view but keeps every piece of your data on their servers, ready to be reactivated at any time and, presumably, still being used for analytics and advertising. A few platforms had no deletion option at all in their interface and required me to email their customer support team. One of those emails got a response after nine days. Another never got a response at all.
For Indian services specifically, the experience was mixed:
- Flipkart: No self-service account deletion. I had to email their support team and wait five days for confirmation. The data download option worked, though, so I was able to save old order receipts before deletion.
- Paytm: Account closure is available in settings, but you need to withdraw your wallet balance first. If you delete the account with money in it, that money is gone. I almost lost Rs 1,200 because I did not check.
- IRCTC: This was the worst. Account deletion is barely acknowledged as a feature. I ended up calling their customer care number and spending forty minutes on the phone. The agent seemed confused that anyone would want to delete their account.
- Swiggy: Deletion option is in the app settings. Worked without issues. Took about 48 hours for full deletion.
- Zomato: Also has a deletion option in settings. Reasonably painless.
- IndiaMart: I had a listing on IndiaMart from a small freelance project years ago. My phone number was on it. Removing it required contacting their support. Took over a week.
- Naukri.com: The old resume was the most alarming find. Deletion took a few days through their help centre, but the cached version on Google stuck around for another two weeks after that.
The website justdelete.me saved me hours. It has direct links to the account deletion pages for hundreds of services, colour-coded by difficulty. Green means the deletion is easy and self-service. Yellow means there are some hoops. Red means good luck, you are in for a fight. Black means deletion is reportedly not possible at all. I kept this site open in a browser tab for the entire first week.
One mistake I made early on, and I really regret it: I deleted three accounts before downloading my data from them. I lost order receipts from purchases that were still under warranty. I lost a few saved addresses I had not recorded anywhere else. The lesson is simple. Download your data first. Every platform has a "Download Your Data" or "Request Your Data" option somewhere. Use it. Wait for the download. Verify it. Then delete.
Week Two: The Data Brokers
The account deletions were tedious but at least I understood the process. Data brokers were a different kind of frustration entirely.
My phone number and full name were listed on JustDial. I had never created a JustDial account. I had never submitted my details to them. But at some point I had called a plumber through their service, and that was apparently enough for them to create a public listing with my contact information visible to anyone.
JustDial has a helpline you can call to request delisting. I called, explained what I wanted, and was told it would take about a week. It took ten days, but the listing did eventually come down. The process was polite but slow.
My name also appeared on a people-search aggregator site I had never heard of. These sites scrape data from public records, social media profiles, and other databases, then compile it into searchable profiles. Anyone can type in a name and get a result with phone numbers, email addresses, estimated locations, and sometimes even family member names. I found the opt-out form on this particular site buried at the very bottom of their privacy policy page, in a font size that seemed deliberately small. I filled it out. Got a confirmation email three weeks later saying my profile had been removed. I checked, and it actually was gone. Small victory.
For Google search results that displayed my personal information, I used the removal tool at support.google.com/websearch/answer/9673730. Google allows you to request removal of results that show your phone number, home address, email address, or other personal contact details. I submitted requests for two results. Google removed one within four days. The other sat in "under review" status for over three weeks before it finally disappeared.
One thing to understand about Google's removal tool: it only removes the result from Google's search index. The actual information stays on the original website. If someone goes directly to that website, your information is still there. You need to contact the website separately to get the source data taken down. I had to do both in most cases.
Cached pages are yet another problem. Even after a website removes your information, Google's cached version of the page may still show the old data for days or weeks. The Wayback Machine at web.archive.org may also have archived snapshots of the page. For Google caches, the removal tool typically handles it once the original page is updated. For the Wayback Machine, you can email [email protected] and request removal. They are generally cooperative, but it can take a while.
Turns out, the data broker problem never really ends. Three months after I did all of this, I found my phone number on a new aggregator site I had not seen before. It is like weeding a garden. You pull everything out, and a month later new ones have grown in their place.
What Actually Changed
After three weeks of this, I Googled my name again in an incognito window.
The improvement was real but incomplete. The Quora answer was still there (Quora makes deletion frustratingly slow). The college event photo had been taken down after I emailed the website. The old LinkedIn profile was gone. The Times of India comment was gone. My phone number no longer appeared on the first two pages of results. The old resume had finally disappeared from Google's index about two weeks after Naukri confirmed deletion.
My social media profiles were cleaner. I had switched Instagram and Facebook to private. I had removed my birth year, my phone number, and my workplace from Facebook. I had deleted hundreds of old posts with location data. My Twitter was wiped clean of anything before 2024.
Google's data collection was under control. Auto-delete was set. Location History was off. Web & App Activity was paused. I had gone through Google Drive and removed or restricted sharing on documents I had accidentally made public.
But some things were still out there. Cached pages that had not yet been refreshed. A couple of data broker listings that had reappeared. Old forum posts on sites where account deletion was apparently impossible. A Reddit account I had forgotten about and still need to go back and clean up.
The internet does not let go easily. You cannot get to zero. But you can get from "anyone can find my phone number, home address, date of birth, and workplace in five minutes" to "it would take actual effort to piece together meaningful information about me." That difference matters.
I also sent DPDP Act erasure requests to five companies that I could not get to delete my data through normal channels. The email is simple. Subject line: "Request for Personal Data Erasure under the DPDP Act, 2023." State your name, email address, phone number, and any account identifiers. Say you withdraw consent for processing and want all your data deleted. Ask for confirmation when it is done. Three companies responded within ten days and confirmed deletion. One responded after three weeks saying they needed to retain some data for tax compliance, which is allowed under the Act. One never responded at all. I still have the option of complaining to the Data Protection Board of India about that last one, though I am not sure how effective the Board is at this stage.
Three Months Later
I still find things. Last month it was an old Google Drive document I had shared publicly with a link for a college group project. The month before that, a LinkedIn endorsement for a skill I do not actually have, from someone I do not remember connecting with. A few weeks ago, I found a comment I had left on a YouTube video in 2019. Small things. But they add up.
The maintenance part is not as bad as the initial cleanup. I spend about an hour every two months going through the same checklist: Google my name, check a few data broker sites, review my social media settings (platforms quietly update privacy options and sometimes reset things to defaults after updates), and deal with anything new that has appeared. It has become a routine, like paying bills or getting the car serviced.
If you are thinking about doing this yourself, my advice would be this. The first two weeks are the hardest. You will find things that surprise you and things that worry you. The account deletion process is deliberately tedious, and some companies make it so inconvenient that most people give up. That is by design. Push through it. Keep your spreadsheet updated. Download your data before you delete anything.
And be realistic. You will not erase yourself from the internet. That is not achievable for anyone who has been online for more than a few years. But you can remove the most sensitive material. You can take down the things that could be used for identity theft, social engineering, or stalking. You can reduce your exposure from "wide open" to "reasonably controlled."
Whether it was worth the effort? Still not sure. Some days I think yes, some days I think I wasted two weeks on something that does not really matter. But I sleep a little better, so maybe that counts for something.
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