How to Find Information on Yourself Online If you’ve been using the Internet for any length of time, there’s probably a lot of information out there about you from your and your friends’ social media account, message boards, blogs, and sites that you’ve registered for, even if you’ve not used them for a while. In fact, even if you’re among the rare people who barely ever use the Internet, chances are there’s still information available on you online that you might not even know exists. And, it’s not just for people with public profiles on social networks or those who freely give out their information online; everybody is becoming increasingly aware that websites are tracking us using cookies to target advertisements, for example. So, if you want to know exactly what information people can access about you online, how do you get started? Search for Yourself: One of the simplest ways to find out what comes up if somebody like a potential employer were to do an online search for you is to do it yourself. Put your name into Google and see what comes up. If you’re lucky enough to share a name with somebody who’s famous then you might not find much information on you personally unless you’re willing to go pages into the results, but chances are, you’ll find something - even if it’s just a link to your social profiles. Check Your Social Profiles: If you’re like most people then you probably have a profile on at least one or two of the big social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. But, is the information that you share actually available to the public when you thought that you were only sharing it with a select group of friends? If you hadn’t changed your Facebook privacy settings to ‘friends only’, for example, then anybody could be seeing the statuses that you post, which could prove troublesome if you’ve ever posted any personal information. Luckily, the big social networks allow you to use their privacy settings to see who the information you post is accessible by and change it if you need to. If you would rather keep your status updates and shares private, the best option is to lock down all your profiles so that only those people you’ve chosen to give permission to will be able to see what you share. Use a Public Records Site: Even if you’re very private and careful about what you post online, certain public records about you may still be available to anybody. Usually, this is information that is already accessible to the public such as criminal records, citation records, and education records. You can use a site like Public Records Reviews to see if your citation records are still accessible by the public, for example. Public Records Reviews allows you to type in your name, or the name of somebody else, to access all publicly held information on that individual. What Do Social Networks Know About Me? Social networks are the sites that know the most about you - in fact, collecting information on users is their main job. They use the information that they collect about you to sell advertisements that you are likely to resolute with. For example, you can see the topics that Instagram thinks you will like to see ads for by going to Settings > Security > Access Data > Ads, to get a running list of the topics that Instagram thinks you’ll like to see when it comes to ads on the platform. On Facebook, there’s so much data about each user that they have split up the downloads into different sections and logs to allow for more manageable viewing of it. If you like, you can download an archive of everything you’ve ever done on Facebook but bear in mind that it’s going to be a very, very large file. Can You Remove Yourself From Internet Search Results? While some publicly available information about you might not be able to be removed, the answer is yes, you can remove yourself from Internet search results. If you’ve searched yourself on Google and found some results that you would rather not be there, you can request that it be removed by the search engine. You will need to fill in a form which will then be reviewed manually by Google employees. Google has received over 800,000 requests to delist URLs since 2014. There are some reasons why a request might be removed, including technical reasons, duplicate URLs, or if the information is deemed to be strongly in the public interest. As using the Internet becomes an integral part of our daily lives, more and more information on individuals is being made available online. While this is sometimes a good thing, it’s always good to know exactly what other people could find if they searched your name.