Once something is on the internet, it stays there. But why is that?
An old photo, a comment in a forum, a long-forgotten entry on a profile – once something is online, it rarely disappears completely.
This is because someone may have saved, copied or redistributed it without you even noticing. Even if the original post is deleted, copies often continue to exist elsewhere.
The internet has an extremely good memory.
Your rights under the GDPR
The General Data Protection Regulation obliges the ‘controller’ – i.e. the company that published the personal data – to not only delete this data, but also to inform recipients of any deletion requests.
The aim is to ensure that the data also disappears from third parties. In practice, however, this is only possible to a limited extent, as not every copy can be found or deleted. It is important to know that a ‘disproportionate’ effort to inform third parties is not required of the controller.
What can you do? You can search for old traces yourself.
Discover old versions of websites
There are services that have been specially developed to archive old versions of websites. You can then see what your own or another website looked like a few years ago. One example is the Internet archive ‚WaybackMachine‘:
- Enter a URLor keywords in the searchbar and you will be shown a calendar marking all the days on which a snapshot of this website was taken.
- Clicking on the marked date will take you to the webpage as it looked on that day and at the specified time.
Where do your images appear on the internet?
Would you like to know whether a specific photo of you or, for example, of a family member appears somewhere on the internet?
Go to the Google homepage (as an exception *) and click on the small photo icon on the right-hand side of the search bar:
You can then either upload an image or insert a link to a published image. Google will now list all the places where it has found this image.
Would you like to have content deleted?
- First, contact the operator of the respective website – you can request deletion there.
- If that doesn’t work, you can at least get Google to stop displaying the affected page in its search results. This significantly reduces how often the website will be found (you can find the relevant form hier).
Summary:
The internet won’t forget everything, but you are not powerless. With a little research, the right tools and a clear understanding of your rights, you can control your digital footprint – or at least visibly reduce it.
* By the way, why did we mention using Google’s homepage ‘as an exception’? Simply because we normally prefer and recommend more privacy-friendly search engines such as startpage.com, qwant.com or ecosia.org.