The Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León, first Governor of Puerto Rico, traveled to what is now Florida in 1513 searching for the Fountain of Youth [Wikipedia]. Little did he realize that said fountain has now been discovered and it is called… “Google.” 😉
As many of you know — and unfortunately many still do not — once you publish something on the Internet, it stays there forever. Yes, read this again: FOR EVER!
Even if you delete the contents of your blog, remove the pictures from your gallery, unsubscribe from newsletters, and delete your accounts from Facebook, mypace and other social media venues — you’re still floating around in cyberspace, hidden on backup servers, cached content, and the hard drives of millions of home computers that have viewed (and therefore downloaded) your pages, pictures and words. Yes, in a sense, you are immortalised. Not necessarily young, but certainly as you appear in your picture the day you (or a friend) published it on the Internet.
You can try to remove and clear your trails, but success is only fleeting at best. But you can try, and this is the gist of the article at Wired, though we have to laugh at tips #4 (many search engines simply ignore robots.txt) and #5 (note to Wired editor: this tip has nothing to do with the article and should be removed).
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Great article thanks so much for sharing it.