Ask HN: How to Clean Digital Footprint?

Realistically, it's near impossible to erase yourself from the Internet. However, it's good to at least try to disconnect things from yourself as much as possible. Stop using your real name on accounts where possible, for one. Ideally, stop using common nicknames across various sites so that it is harder to track you across the web and between "generations" of websites and platforms. And of course, you can delete your old accounts and posts on a lot of sites to start punching holes in your history.

You will never disappear from the Internet, but for most purposes, search visibility is what's truly revealing: Break common conventions people use to follow your activity across the web.

If I wanted to find out more about say, an HN user, I might try twitter.com/theirusername or github.com/theirusername, from there, it's often easy to see their real name and employer or links to their websites. If someone's HN, Reddit, Twitter, and GitHub usernames are all unique though... there's a good chance the search stops right there.