Removing your traces from the internet

A few days back, I searched on the internet for my name and I was surprised to see how many accounts I created once were pointing towards me. It's a bit scary when almost any interested person can get access to the internet and get to know about me, my location, activities, photos from facebook, flicker, google+ profiles etc. So I went to each link separately and hid my personal data which I shared once a couple of years ago.

Anyway, after sometime I figured out what google account settings can do for me. They are actually pretty handy to handle this issue. Under these settings you can search for your name and it will show you all the results from google search. You can actually do the same without going to settings thing. But interestingly, it also provides you the option to get alerts from google whenever a new data on the web is linked to your profile. Cool na?

Step 1:

Go to account settings from this link. If you are not logged into your gmail account, it will ask for username and password to reach there, of course.

Step 2: (De)linking your other google accounts
 Go to Account ==> Dashboard as shown below:

Here you can actually see all of your accounts connected with your gmail account and saved on google servers. There might be other third party websites too where you logged in with your gmail account but they will not be displayed here.

You can see following things from this page:
-google account details
-alerts set up with your gmail account
-how many android devices are linked with this account
-blogger profile
-orkut profile
-picassa
-google calendars
-youtube channels list etc.

It provides a good summary of all these account and you can take appropriate action from here.


Step 3: Find your traces from internet


If you click on 'Me on web' link as shown below, you can do very interesting things. You can search yourself on google, set alerts for future data being linked to your profile and you can also review your g+ profile over here.

Step 4: De-linking other third party websites from your google accounts


Click on Security and scroll down the page to see 'Connected applications and sites'. This is where you can all the sites where you ever used your gmail account to login into their website quickly. You can actually revoke all the access from those websites.

Click on 'Review Permissions' and you shall see a screen like below.

So you can revoke access for all of the uninteresting website from this link. You don't have to go to each site separately.

Happy googling =)