I’ve been doing the same. The potential downside risk of having LinkedIn/Facebook/Instagram profiles just keeps growing and growing. I’m a complete ghost on the Internet. I have Google alerts set up for my names and email addresses, and I regularly attempt to docs myself to find any leaks. I also can’t understand why anyone in the public eye doesn’t completely sanitise their social media profiles. The amount of people brought down by 10 year old stupid tweets is insane.

I was going to ask if you said "docs" as in "doxxing" [0] but then a quick Wikipedia search got me to the etymology [1] of "doxxing" which comes from "docs" as in "documents"! TIL

[0] https://www.thefreedictionary.com/doxx [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing#Etymology

This. The best way to erase social media is to replace the account with a bunch of BS. Most of these companies are too cheap and Zucker's "move fast" culture probably doesn't involve database record versioning. Also because it's expensive. The old SET _deleted_=1 is pretty much their main ace in the hole to f*k you. Hell, even if they do versioning, just keep filling the profiles with enough noise and they won't be able to filter it all out unless they somehow index and data warehouse your profile from the decrepit old backup. At that point, you are just hoping their schema changes, the logistics, and their bad practices are enough to prevent that from being cost efficient.

I saw someone on here had a program that went in your profile and rewrote all posts with garbage data before you deleted it. Like for Facebook, Twitter, Discord, etc. That way you know their database is filled with junk data. I'd really like to know what that was again so I could peak at it in case I ever wanted to do that.

> To ensure they're not used as socket puppets.

sock puppets :)

Done much network programming lately?

Socket pups sounds like such a lovely alternative to sockpuppets.

I had someone do that to me when I've been -still alive-... just posting the weirdest shit right on other people's pages after adding a bunch of my friends for a cheap laugh.

It was literally just some idiot binging on drugs who thought it was really funny until i ran over to his place and kicked his door in. I had people ask me what the hell that was about for YEARS afterwards. How do you explain to all these people at parties or whatever that you just happen to know stupider people than they do?

> I'm squatting. To ensure they're not used as socket puppets.

Good idea. I've noticed more of those popping up. My wife has an Instagram impersonator that constantly spams some kind of essential oils crap or other beauty product snake oil.

I would do this, but my data has been up in social media long enough that I don't believe it makes a significant difference if I superficially "delete" it now. Maybe I'm wrong?

At this point, I just don't add anything new. If they're going to host my content ad infinitum, I might as well use their storage space and bandwidth.

I guess it probably would be worth ditching LinkedIn. There's no good reason why a [worthwhile] prospective employer would require it.

The best time was not to do it in the first place. The second best time is now.

Your past self, current self, and your future self are different people. Don't give in to sunk cost fallacy here.

>The aggregators never really delete anything.

Sort of. Data that is 5+ years old is pretty stale. How many things don't change over that period of time and how can you be sure that they haven't changed? The most valuable things are phone numbers and email addresses. We expect those to be maintained so we can re-establish contact with old friends.

Same, but also adding a lot of fake data. Then again, they're probably smart enough to figure out what is real.

But if you made it a thing to daily post fake things so that the activity looks normal, can you eventually convice the social overlords you are someone else?

Relocate yourself to another city/state/country in your profile. Daily make posts about things occurring in that new location. Make those posts in sync with local time. Of course using a VPN endpoint that correlates.

I am surprised there is not a service for this!

Check out Redact(https://redact.dev/).

How do you know you can trust this app, by the way?

Thanks for the tip! Miss google on the services

Sucks, but heres why no google support:

From the redact.dev FAQ page:

Why don't you support anything made by Google or Apple? At this time, we are reliant on both Google and Apple to be listed in their respective app stores. As such, we have been advised that in order to remain in good standing we should not offer support for these services.

Ouch.

this is the right approach

How do you scrub your Facebook profile? There aren’t good tools for it. Facebook itself only lets you do it one post at a time in their activity log. Their constant design changes have broken extensions that used to help you do it (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-m...)