How to Clean Up Your Digital Footprint and Remove Personal Information Online

Almost every user leaves a digital footprint online, anything from phone numbers and email addresses to old accounts, posts, and activity history. Some of this information can end up in search results, caller ID databases, old services, or data leak dumps. In this guide, we’ll walk you through where to start cleaning up your digital footprint, which services to check, and how to reduce the amount of your personal information available to the public.

First, check if your phone number is visible in number lookup and public search services. The most common ones are Getcontact and Truecaller.

Open the app, go to the Profile Management section, and enable the option to hide your data. In Truecaller, use the Unlist feature to remove your number from public search.

It’s also a good idea to send official removal requests to the admins of specialized Telegram bots that collect databases.

Google offers tools to protect your personal data. Use the special Request to Remove Personal Information form to exclude pages containing your home address, phone number, or email address from search results. This step can make your contact details much less accessible to strangers.

Old and forgotten accounts are a common source of leaks, spam, and data reuse. Search your email for terms like confirm email, verify email, welcome, or registration to find old sign-ups. Open and fully delete any outdated accounts you find to erase the personal data linked to them.

You should check whether your data has been exposed in hacker attacks. On the site Have I Been Pwned, you can see if your email address has appeared in known leaks. If the service confirms a password leak, immediately change your passwords to new, unique combinations.

To reduce the amount of data being collected, go to Google My Activity. Here, it is recommended to delete your activity history for all time. You should also disable automatic saving of search history, location data, and YouTube watch history.

Old posts, comments, and messages also add to your digital footprint. The longer they stay online, the more personal information they can reveal.

For X (formerly Twitter), there are tools that automatically delete posts older than a certain period, like 30 days. On VKontakte, you can remove old posts manually or by using a browser console script. Here’s an example:

In Telegram, you can use the auto-delete feature to remove messages after a set time.

To leave less data in the future, use email aliases when signing up for new websites. Examples of such services include SimpleLogin or the Hide My Email feature from Apple when registering on new platforms.

This helps keep your main email address hidden and makes it easy to disable an alias if it ever gets leaked. It is also useful to use browsers with enhanced privacy protection, like Brave or Mozilla Firefox, which block tracking cookies by default.

You can’t erase your digital footprint completely, but regularly checking old accounts, posts, leaks, and privacy settings greatly lowers your risks and makes your data much less accessible to outsiders.