…a service that scours the world wide web and tells you where your email ID is registered?
It might have been the technology forums you registered on 3 years ago when you were desperately looking to revive your dead laptop by hunting for answers using your slow phone browser, or the product review sites you visited when you wanted to find the difference between SVGA and XGA resolutions for the new projector you wanted to buy.
It might have been those “social” sites (StumbleUpon, Tumblr, del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, etc) that you registered for but never got around to using as regularly as Facebook… or the “aggregator” social sites (Meebo, HootSuite, etc) that came along later and tried to link all your social networks for you at one place (problem was that even they weren’t alone, and hence you went to many “aggregators” and the same problem perpetuated).
Or maybe it were the innumerable sites where you left your email ID without so much as a care… a fact that’s reflected by the bacn in your inbox (by the hour, every hour) from what seem to be a melting pot of travel sites, daily deals sites, restaurant review sites, online shopping sites, news sites, games sites and the like…
In this age of 30-second attention spans on the Internet, wouldn’t it just be nice to have ONE service that you can register for – that is capable of searching the dark corners of the internet to FIND where you’ve left your identity – and then either point you there so that you can deregister yourself manually, or automatically deregister you?
But then, wouldn’t THIS information about your past transgressions also be valuable for this “deregistration” service provider – to know what kind of a person you are – what kind of sites did you register yourself on and when – how have you changed over time…
The point is, in today’s era, when no amount of “personal” information is enough, would you readily sign up with such a service, if it even existed, knowing that even though your omnipresent identity all over the internet will go away by using this service, the tradeoff would mean you end up providing a fairly accurate profile of yourself to this one entity?
Well, you probably would – when you’d realize that the solution to this predicament is quite simple.
You’d use this service, deregister yourself from all the websites around the world, and then deregister yourself from this service, and disable your email ID.
Wipe off all traces of yourself on the Internet.
Start afresh.
It might mean you have to make the effort of reestablishing contact with your online world using a new email ID, but guess that’s a fair price to pay for being careless with your old email ID in the first place.
And remember… next time, don’t go overboard.