How to Clean Up Your Digital History:
Once you post something to the internet, it's there forever unless you take steps to remove it (and even then, you may not be successful.) While keeping your digital history around in perpetuity can have its advantages—digging out those tax emails from 2006, looking back on vacations from half a decade ago—it's also worth keeping some parts of our online trails as short as we can.
First, it means nothing from our past can come back and embarrass us. Second, it makes it harder for advertising companies to keep track of what we're up to online. And third (in the case of files and emails at least), it frees up space for new stuff.
If you've decided that you'd rather not have decades worth of tweets and emails hanging around, there are ways to put limits on your digital baggage. Note this is slightly different to stopping sites and networks from tracking you as you make your way around the web, though the two are definitely linked.
(Score: 3, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @05:22AM (2 children)
You can't, you fuckbook twitter idiots.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @05:30AM
This from a boomer of whom anybody who cares has a name, home address, social security number, motorcycle serial number, and concealed carry permit? (Last one is a test. Runaway does not have a permit. But, knowing that is part of the doxxing. ) My gawd, some boomers are just not suited to the information age? Leaking the details of your surgery, online, on gaming sites? What is wrong with you, Runaway? And that stuff about your daughter-in-law! Should have keep that on the down low. But, there is a Window machine, in the house, so, we all know what that means.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday October 26 2020, @05:44PM
It is people younger than Millennials.
Say, about 19 years of age.
Why can't they just NOT do stupid things? Don't drink and then operate power tools, heavy machinery in the metal shop, or drive vehicles. Don't go to STD spreading parties. Nor COVID-19 spreading parties. Don't be "boofing" beer like Gorsuch. (your rectum doesn't have the alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme that can help break down ethanol)
But most of all . . . don't join social media! It's a Trap!
All of your many decades of wisdom should be enough for you to realize this. Just remember how Usenet turned out. CompuServe. Telegraph. Etc.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @09:47AM (1 child)
It seems like some ad for a twitter deleting service which costs money.
I think any of us could give better pointers, such as:
A) Only morons use their real name.
B) Twitter can be useful to gather news, but there's no need to have an account or post replies. The only real outcome posting to twitter can have on your life, is to fuck it up good and solid. Getting a "like" isn't worth that kind of risk.
C) Fuck Gmail. Use a real email address. Screw IMAP, delete that stuff from the server the second you download it to your computer.
D) If you're going to put files on dropbox or the like, encrypt them first then upload. Better yet, just don't do it at all.
E) You have a google account? Are you an idiot? Avoid all google products and services. Ditto facebook.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Monday October 26 2020, @12:17PM
(rant)
I noticed youtube does not allow me to block cookies in its cookie pop-up, unlike every other advertising cookie vendor. Instead they have an obscure posting about blocking at browser level and ask that I install google software(!) as a browser plug in.
Don't be evil.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Unixnut on Monday October 26 2020, @09:52AM (7 children)
> While keeping your digital history around in perpetuity can have its advantages—digging out those tax emails from 200, looking back on vacations from half a decade ago—it's also worth keeping some parts of our online trails as short as we can.
The implication being that the only way you can do this is if you keep it "online", which is of course complete nonsense. I have all my emails since 2005, and all scanned documents and photos since much earlier. All searchable and within easy reach, and also none of them online, but on my local systems.
It is perfectly possible to have the best of both worlds. A long, rich and complete digital history easily searchable, without handing over your life to complete psychopaths who will violate your life 24/7 so they can spy on you and sell it to others to do the same (if not worse).
The fact is, it is not even particularly expensive to do it locally. You don't need some big servers for storage. Outside of the music and video, my entire life fits in a 1TB drive (the bulk of which are the photos, and OCR tagged documents), which is an amount of space that now even my laptop has. And we are talking DSLR RAW photo images, at a good 20MB a pop.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @02:20PM (1 child)
Have you found a good way to scan inside pdf files? I have a lot of old technical papers (on paper) that have been scanned & OCR'd, but they aren't all that useful without some way to scan inside, the long file name is only good for so much.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Unixnut on Tuesday October 27 2020, @06:18AM
Two options come to mind:
1. convert to text first then grep (https://www.xpdfreader.com/pdftotext-man.html):
pdftotext ./file.pdf - | grep -i $needle
2. use "pdfgrep" software (https://pypi.org/project/pdfgrep/) :
pdfgrep $needle ./file.pdf
The above implies that when scanned, the technical documents were properly OCRd rather than just being images embedded in a PDF.
If it is just embedded images, then you can't use the above, and it gets more complicated. I would use "imagemagick" convert binary (https://imagemagick.org/script/convert.php) to convert the PDF to images, then run tesseract OCR on it to extract the text (https://github.com/tesseract-ocr) which can be added to the metadata for future grepping.
In fact the above is similar to a tool I already use, called SDAT (https://github.com/ZivaVatra/SDAT), this will scan documents, automatically OCR then, and save the text in the image metadata. This allows me to grep images using key words, which then shows me the file I can open to get the original scanned document as an image (as the OCR is never 100% correct, it is good to keep the original as a binary image).
It works well enough for me that I have thousands of scanned documents for the last 10 years in my archive, which I can pull up when needed. Unfortunately I am not a Windows user, so I cannot give any recommendations for that OS.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @04:34PM (1 child)
Nope. That's not how it works, at all. Once you put something out there, online, it's out there forever. Sure, you can keep a local copy but if you post it online, it's out there and *will* be found eventually. Creepy online services like google and facebook keep data forever because it is valuable and can be repackaged and sold forever.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Tuesday October 27 2020, @06:26AM
The short version of my original post is you don't have to put it online in the first place to get the benefits they say you get from putting it online. If your data never goes online in the first place, there is nothing for the creepy weirdos to data mine.
Of course, if you already put your entire life online, then you are screwed, and that genie is never going back in the bottle (no matter what any "deletion service" claims they can do). Best thing you can do then is make an offline copy of what is online, try to remove what you can from the internet, and just stop putting more of your data online from that point onwards.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2020, @01:00AM (2 children)
I have had many online avatars. None of which reference me by my legal name.
The sketchiest forum I was in was about sexual fantasies... You know... What it took to rock tke boat, and I discovered that I was not alone in the highly specific and unusual thing that would get me so aroused. I don't think it's even considered porn, as it has nothing to do with reproductive machinery, except tripping me off. Much to my delight, I found others with the same tripoff switch, and we made videos of ourselves doing just that and sharing.
Last time I checked, those videos are still up.
I am very happy I did.not associate my real name with any of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2020, @03:06AM (1 child)
Do not worry. Our face/gait/wang recognition algorithm has associated your real name with it. However we respect your privacy and promise to only use it to sell you things.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2020, @06:30AM
"However we respect your privacy and promise to only use it to sell you things."
Unless of course you become influential in some area that would be to our benefit. Then we will sell your data to a shell company, who will unfortunately have a data breach resulting in all your data becoming both public and identifiable, unless you can help us out with a completely unrelated matter which you happen to have some control over.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Monday October 26 2020, @01:47PM
The way the world is heading right now, practicing discretion online is advisable. But erasing your online presence entirely throws up as much of a red flag as having anything that would draw attention. There's a concept among preppers called the "Grayman Principle," which means you should make yourself as unremarkable and boring as possible. It's not a bad approach for people who are worried about their digital history.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Informative) by https on Monday October 26 2020, @03:19PM (1 child)
I am well-nigh unfindable without manual intervention, but I kinda envy this guy [soylentnews.org].
Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @05:17PM
Or this guy, https://soylentnews.org/~https/ [soylentnews.org] -- his anonymity is secure!