Search

For some time now I have been trying to clean up my digital footprint by requesting deletion of accounts and associated data for unused accounts, and being critical about which accounts I actually benefit from keeping. This turned out to be far more time consuming than I imagined beforehand.

I've been using a password manager for about a decade, so I have a fairly good overview of a lot of the accounts I've opened over the years. However, while privacy has always been important to me, I was more concerned with increasing governmental surveillance rather than corporate surveillance for many years. So over the years I've signed up uncritically to a large number of services. Most of these do not have much data about me, but my username has generally been reused, along with e-mail and sometimes phone number and other more sensitive data. This of course doesn't take into account all those minor services I've signed up for with e-mail + reused password. I have no control over those...

Now

I'm not cynical, overall I think everything will be fine and will continue advocate for privacy. But all the effort towards privacy seems like kind of Sisyphus myth. I don't really gain anything by being privacy conscious, I just regain part of what people used to have before internet. Best case scenario is that I don't exist in eyes of big corps. This just adds to today's complexity which requires constant effort, just so that things wouldn't be taken from me.