Social Good Engineering Magazine: GineersNow Social Innovation GineersNow Engineering Magazine Issue No. 001 | Page 82

Photo Source: Pocketnow
How To Disappear from
the World Wide Web
Well, you can’t.
Not really.
A few years ago, my credit card
company charged me a huge bill for
something I never bought over the
internet. When my mother called me
to confirm the huge purchase, I was
shocked. As soon as I checked where
the money went, I discovered I just
‘subscribed’ myself in a porn site I
never even go to. I had to go through
a long process of clearing out my
name out of the mess and ever since
then, I was very careful in using very
personal details on the internet. I
was a victim of getting hacked and
I’m sure there are millions of people
out there who had to go through
the same ordeal. Some even went
through worse.

Anyone can become a
victim of doxxing. It doesn’t mean
we have to hide ourselves from the
internet. Even if we try, it’ll be hard.
We can’t easily disappear from social
media. We don’t have to purge all of
our online history. That would be a
very difficult task to do but we can
still protect ourselves from trolls who
would want us to become victims of
doxxing.

One way to protect our-
selves from doxxing is to improve
our social media privacy settings to
ensure that only our friends know
what we’re up to in our lives lately.
Also, using strong passwords and
using multiple usernames and email
addresses increase our chances from
getting doxxed. As much as possible,
we should avoid putting a lot of very
personal information in the sites that
we use. Make sure that all the sites
you visit are safe and not shady.

Wanting to disappear from
the internet is never the best solution
to stop doxxing. It’s not even possi-
ble. No matter how many accounts
you delete, there will still be traces of
you found somewhere in the world
wide web. So, it’s best to limit what
you post and protect yourself from
malicious attacks from hackers.
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