• Delete All Your Tweets with TwitWipe [Webapps]

“Thanks to LawyerCT for bringing this topic up on /r/technology. She also provided a list of the top sites online that hold data on you.”

Intelius.com* – Opt-out

Acxiom.com – Opt-out

MyLife.com – To request that a Member Profile or Public Profile be deleted, please contact Customer Care at 1-888-704-1900 or contact us by email at privacy@mylife.com. Upon receipt of these requests, and confirmation that you are requesting that your own profile be removed, please allow MyLife 10 business days to complete this removal. It may be necessary to contact you to validate that you are the profile owner requesting the removal. This is to ensure the correct identity and profile ownership before completing these requests, and is for the protection of our users and their privacy.

Zabasearch.com* – Opt-out

Spokeo.com – Opt-out

BeenVerified.com – LawyerCT’s guide

Peekyou.com – Opt-Out

USSearch.com* – Opt-Out

PeopleFinders.com – Opt-Out: Annoying form you have to mail in

PeopleLookup.com* – In order for PeopleLookup to suppress or opt out your personal information from appearing on our Website, we need to verify your identity. To do this, we require faxed proof of identity. Proof of identity can be a state issued ID card or driver’s license. If you are faxing a copy of your driver’s license, we require that you cross out the photo and the driver’s license number. We only need to see the name, address and date of birth. We will only use this information to process your opt out request. Please fax to 425-974-6194 and allow 4 to 6 weeks to process your request.

PeopleSmart.com – Opt-Out

PrivateEye.com – Opt-Out

Whitepages.com – Opt-Out

USA-People-Search.com – Opt-Out: Yet another form to mail in

Spoke.com – Scroll Down to Access and Correction Section for more info

PublicRecordsNow.com – Still determining how to remove…

DOBSearch.com* – In order for us to “opt out” your public information from being viewable on the public DOBsearch People Finder search results, we need to verify your identity and require faxed proof of identity. Proof of identity can be a state issued ID card or driver’s license, or notarized letter. If you are faxing a copy of your driver’s license, you may cross out the photo and the driver’s license number. We only need to see the name, address and date of birth. Please fax to 516-717-3017 and allow 4 to 6 weeks to completely process your request. It is your responsibility to ensure legibility of your document

Radaris.com – Opt-Out; Thanks to those who figured it out.

[HOW TO: Remove yourself from ALL background check websites. Thanks to LawyerCT on Reddit]

“Lightweight Portable Security (LPS), created by the US Department of Defense, is a small Linux live CD focusing on privacy and security, for  this reason, it boots from a CD and executes from RAM, providing a web browser, a file manager and some interesing tools. LPS-Public turns an untrusted system into a trusted network client.”

[Unixmen]     [http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm]

[Download the LPS-Public ISO image, version 1.2.2 (16 July 2011)]

“If you have been troubled by recent revelations that your cell phone can be used to reveal details of your personal life, this item will probably boost your concern level. It turns out that there is actually a commercially available device specifically designed for sucking data out of your handheld. In fact, Cellebrite Ltd. (www.cellebrite.com) has just released Version 2.0 of its Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED), designed to provide “law enforcement and government intelligence agencies with new capabilities for improved extraction, retrieval, and analysis of mobile phone data.”

Three new features are included in the latest release. The UFED Physical Analyzer is a parsing tool and report generator that offers upgraded ability to analyze and parse iPhone and Blackberry devices. It includes an instant search function, plug-in support, and Python scripting. The support base has been enhanced to include nearly 6,000 devices, including Samsung, LG, and Sony Ericsson products, and “historically challenging” CDMA memory dump capability has been expanded by 200 devices. Finally, V. 2 includes the UFED Phone Detective which lets users instantly identify the specific model phone you are using.

The bottom line is that the product “enables military, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies to easily extract deleted data, passwords, contacts, text messages, call logs, emails, GPS locations, web history, calendar entries, and much more. New parsing capabilities such as iPhone Skype support, browser cookies, Wi-Fi and cell tower locations, and more make it the most advanced end-to-end solution available to the mobile forensic community.” At $4,799 a pop, it’s not exactly cheap, but probably well within the budget of your local constabulary.”

Clean My Wall uses a JS bookmarklet to delete posts from your Facebook wall.  It takes time – in fact, if you’ve been using Facebook for a while it can take a very long time but it does save you from deleting posts one-by-one.  While there’s no guaranty that Facebook hasn’t stored the wall post data for later abuse use it can’t hurt to clean up the mess.  It also limits the amount of data mining that a human reading your wall can perform.

[Clean My Wall]

UPDATE:  According to the website, “Due to a lack of time, cleanmywall is no longer supported.”

“Google Plus uses Google’s Picasa Web Albums (soon to be renamed to Google Photos) as the backend for Google Plus photos, so in order to migrate your Facebook photos to Google Plus, you’re actually moving them all to Picasa. With Move2Picasa, that process is extremely simple.”

[Move Your Photos Chrome Extension]

Allan said in a post on O’Reilly Radar:

“Today at Where 2.0 Pete Warden and I will announce the discovery that your iPhone, and your 3G iPad, is regularly recording the position of your device into a hidden file. Ever since iOS 4 arrived, your device has been storing a long list of locations and time stamps. We’re not sure why Apple is gathering this data, but it’s clearly intentional, as the database is being restored across backups, and even device migrations. “

“The presence of this data on your iPhone, your iPad, and your backups has security and privacy implications. We’ve contacted Apple’s Product Security team, but we haven’t heard back.”

Allan has posted a YouTube video that explains how the file was discovered and what data the file contains.

They have also released an open-source application that “maps the information that your iPhone is recording about your movements.”

What can be done to protect yourself?  According the the researchers, “An immediate step you can take is to encrypt your backups through iTunes (click on your device within iTunes and then check “Encrypt iPhone Backup” under the “Options” area).”

[O'Reilly Radar]

This procedure will erase all data on the disk and make it difficult to recover – needless to say, you should backup any important data prior to using this procedure.  Also note that this only applies to standard hard drives.  Solid state drives require special handling as noted in this post.

These steps assume you have a Mac OS X 10.2.3 or later CD.

1. Insert the Mac OS X CD
2. Restart the computer
3. Immediately after the startup sound, press and hold the “C” key to start up from CD.
4. When the Installer screen appears, do not click Continue. Instead, choose Installer > Open Disk Utilities
5. Select the hard drive to erase
6. Click the Erase tab
7. Select the volume format from the Volume Format pop-up menu (Most Likely “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”
8. Click “Security Options”
9. Select the checkbox for “Zero Out Data”
10. Click OK
11. Click Erase

Note that it can take a very long time for this process to complete depending on the wipe method selected and the size of the disk to be erased.

In January Facebook announced that it would support encrypted connections via HTTPS.  You should definitely enable this option if you use Facebook from public Internet access points (think Starbucks).

To enable this feature, log into your Facebook account, select “Account Settings” from the “Account” menu on the top right.   Under “Account Security“, click the change button and check the box that says “Browse Facebook on a secure connection (https) whenever possible” – then click “Save.”

HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox extension produced as a collaboration between The Tor Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  The extension encrypts your communications with a number of major websites such as: Google Searches, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, bit.ly, GMX, WordPress.com blogs, The New York Times, The Washington Post and many others.

Many sites on the web offer some limited support for encryption over HTTPS, but make it difficult to use. For instance, they may default to unencrypted HTTP, or fill encrypted pages with links that go back to the unencrypted site.

The HTTPS Everywhere extension fixes these problems by rewriting all requests to these sites to HTTPS.

[Download the HTTPS Everywhere Extension for Firefox]