Disappear from the internet
Your trail lives in three places. Search results, the accounts you opened, and the files companies keep on you. You shrink it in this order, and every step has the law on its side.
Leave the search results
Anyone looking for you by name starts at Google or Bing. European law gives you the right to ask that a result stop appearing next to your name when the information is outdated, irrelevant or excessive. It is the right to be forgotten, and both engines run their own form for it. Removing the result does not erase the source page. For that, step 3 writes to the site that published it.
Google Spain (C-131/12) and Article 17 GDPR
See what Google keeps, and the form Bing's formDelete the accounts you no longer use
Every account you left open holds data that can surface in the next breach. Social networks let you delete the account and its content in their own settings, and the effect is larger than it looks. With the account gone, the search engine loses the page it was indexing. Start with the ones you have not opened in over a year. When a platform makes deletion hard, or keeps data after the account closes, the formal request in step 3 forces it to show what remains and to erase it.
How to delete each account What the platforms keepAsk companies to erase what they hold
After the visible accounts come the files you do not see. The supermarket with your purchase history, the telecom with your traffic data, the site where you bought something once years ago. Any of them must show you what it has and erase what is there. The request generator writes the letter and tells you where to send it, and the My requests page tracks the deadline.
Articles 15 and 17 GDPR, thirty-day deadline
Write a requestCome back from time to time
Search your own name every few months and deal with whatever shows up. The full Apagar keeps the list of your requests and warns you when a deadline passes with no answer.