I too stripped away my online presence a few years ago. I even went ahead further and deleted all my accounts I don't use, aren't privacy-oriented, etc. I now have a spreadsheet of the very few accounts I have for specific products and services. To that extent, I rarely sign up for anything new these days and or use a lot of applications and services.

I also say nay to having an online presence. I prefer silent, out-of-sight, deep work. On the other hand, I do support having a blog to journal and or log about anything you'd like, public or private. If public, I suggest to not use your real name, etc, but an unusual name like a 8-bit binary number.

Not having an online presence is free-ing. Having an online presence feels like you're a brand and are subjugated to update. Cal Newport might have talked about something along these above things in his latest book, "Digital Minimalism".

I feel super fortunate that I have a relatively common first and last name, and you pretty much cannot find me through search engines. I have several name-doppelgängers out there that do ample SEO for themselves. Plus we have the rapper now. I have close to zero presence on social media. You would be hard pressed to find a single photo of me by doing basic name and location searches. Really didn’t have to do any scrubbing or “reputation management.” I consider it a real, rare blessing in this world where online privacy is disappearing.

I have no doubt a highly motivated and technical individual (or nation state adversary) could find and dox me, but the average curious HR person or run-of-the-mill stalker will likely not have much luck.

>I feel super fortunate that I have a relatively common first and last name, and you pretty much cannot find me through search engines.

Same here. My ultra-common first and last name means I'm also essentially unsearchable. On occasion as an experiment I'll try to find myself using combinations of my name (including an also-super-common middle name) and birth city, cities I'm lived in, jobs I've had, companies I've worked for, hobbies, and other things would normally narrow down a person in a search engine. I've never found myself. I've gone a hundred page deep in google, bing, duckduckgo, and others (both regular and image searches) and I've never once found me. It's like having an invisibility superpower.

Same here. It also makes it harder to find you in gigantic password db dumps.

It's an interesting consideration in naming a child.

> I can practise skills that I will find useful and I can learn, all without publishing evidence of it online.

So can and do I. This nickname belongs to a "fake identity" I use online for services where I don't want to be connected with my real name. I got an fitting email address and thought about a first (Martin, obviously) and a family name, too, so I can pass most registrations. Took me about half an hour to set it all up, you should try that too.

How did you achieve that and what about sites like archive.org?

Also, have you considered going a "middle path" where you are searchable but no info comes up besides your name and face? With how things seem to be evolving I lean torwards a "grey man" strategy because some day you will be suspicious by not being searchable online. At least that's what I kinda fear.

I'm lucky that I share a first and last name with someone who is a successful Social Media influencer, also with a professional photographer, a journalist and and an amateur model (Haha, I wonder if that is enough for an Internet detective to work out my name!). This helps because they all have very searchable content online.

I've tried to strike a balance between anonymity and retaining 'placeholder' accounts with my name. I can't rule out a change of heart in the future.

I removed all data from facebook manually by using Social Book Posts Manager. Clunky but it works. It took about a week of different sessions to allow it to work through all of my facebook content. My FB account still exists but is effectively private, all the settings are as locked down as I can make them.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-m...

I deleted all my tweets manually and set my account to private where possible.

I stripped my LinkedIn profile back to basics manually because I didn't really use it anyway. I don't need it, I have a job I'm happy with that pays the mortgage, I don't feel the need to network myself.

I removed the content from my website (<firstname><lastname>.co.uk). I left it displaying my domain registrar's holding page because I figured Google would down-rate that. It appears to have worked because it never appears in search results for either or both of my names.

My domain is a .co.uk so I've taken advantage of Nominet's anonymity service and no details are visible via public WHOIS.

I haven't asked Archive.org to remove the archived versions of my site, if someone knows about it, they could look there. At present I don't actually have any publicly accessible storage to place the robots.txt so I keep procrastinating about it.

I submitted a removal request to 192.com which is a site that publishes UK telephone directory data. They honour removal requests.

I occasionally google myself (especially from new devices and new locations/IP addresses to see if Google is presenting different results for different searchers) to check.

Thank you for your extensive reply!

Be careful. You might leave a trace of yourself by searching for yourself on new, and perhaps even non-trusted devices.

Streisand effect came to mind, too.

You've changed the subject slightly, away from searchability and online presence/self promotion, to tracking by Big Brother.

I concede that Google track me everywhere, I can't stop it so I live with it. I aim for a managed level of visibility.

I use uMatrix and uBlock Origin to reduce some of my digital footprint.

You can throw Google in a container but it comes with its own annoyances.