Matt Burgess writes: “Depending on when you were born, there’s a good chance you’ve spent either several decades online or have never known an offline world. Whatever the case, the internet and its advertising giants know a huge amount about your life. Amazon, Facebook, and Google all have reams of data about you—including your likes and dislikes, health information and social connections—but they’re not the only ones. Countless murky data brokers that you’ve never heard of collect huge quantities of information about you and sell it on. On top of that, all your ancient web forum comments and ill-advised social media posts are still out there. At this stage it’s going to be very difficult to completely delete yourself from the internet, but there are some steps you can take to remove a lot of it.”