This June, researchers at Cybernews found a database sitting open on the internet with 24 billion stolen records, 8.3 terabytes of them. Most of it came from infostealers, software that quietly installs itself and copies everything you type while the owner of the machine reads the news. You are probably already in there, and you did nothing wrong to end up there.
Around the same time, a guide started going around on X, signed by an Anonymous account: "How to Disappear From the Internet in 7 Days." It got close to fifty thousand views, and it has a rare virtue: it is honest at the end. The last line says you will not disappear, you will just become hard to predict. That is the most important sentence in the piece, and it is buried at the bottom. Pull it up and it changes what you are actually trying to do. You do not disappear, nobody does. You become expensive to map. The seven days do not erase you from the world, they shrink and blur the copy of you that is out there. That is what they are worth, not magic.
The seven days, one by one
- The audit. Open every account you have, the email, the social networks, the stores, the apps you installed and forgot, and write the list down in one place. Search your inbox for "welcome" and "confirm your account" to dig out the dead ones. It will be a longer list than you expect, and that is the point: each account is an open door and a seller of your data, and you can only close it once you have seen it.
- The new email. Set up an encrypted address with Proton Mail in Switzerland, or Tutanota, now Tuta in Germany, both with zero-access encryption, where not even the provider can read what is inside. Do not import your contacts or tie it to your real name, and use it as the recovery address for the accounts that count: the bank, the main email, the social networks. Your old Gmail does not die, it becomes a spam bin while the new one becomes your base.
- The phone. It is your most diligent informant, so take its microphones away. Cut location for anything that is not a map, swap "always" for "while using," cut the microphone for anything that is not a call, and delete the apps you have not opened in a month. On iPhone, turn on App Tracking Transparency to block cross-app tracking; on Android, install Exodus Privacy and see, app by app, how many trackers each one hides.
- The browser. Drop Chrome, the machine best tuned in the world to know what you search, and move to Brave or Firefox, with DuckDuckGo for search and uBlock Origin blocking trackers and ads. Keep Chrome only for the two or three things that truly demand it, and stop using it for everything else.
- The messages. Move the conversations that matter to Signal, with versions for Android, iPhone and desktop on the same page, which encrypts the content end to end and cannot hand it to a court, because it does not keep it on its servers. WhatsApp encrypts the message too, but it logs the frame around it, who you talk to, when and how often, and that metadata is worth almost as much as what you wrote. You do not need to delete WhatsApp, you need to stop having the serious talks there.
- The data brokers. Here is the day everyone skips. Data brokers are companies that buy and sell your address, your number, your income bracket and your donations, and almost all of them will remove you if you ask, one at a time. Do it by hand on the biggest ones, like Whitepages, Spokeo and BeenVerified, or pay a service like DeleteMe or Incogni, around a hundred dollars a year, to do the hunting for you. It is the most tedious and recurring step, because they republish you, and it is the only one that erases your public self.
- The new posture. The first six days were systems, this one is you. Use social media like a public square, not a diary: post the version of yourself you would show a stranger on a train, and lock or delete what you left behind. Use a different name where you do not need your real one, and a different photo and bio on each platform, so it costs something to stitch you back together. Be a sketch, not a portrait.
Changing your software is not changing your trail
The seven days split into two gestures. Most of them close taps, protecting what leaves you from tomorrow on. One deals with the water already on the floor, and it is the one everyone skips. You switch your email and your browser and you feel safer, but your address is still printed in a thousand books that have already been photocopied. Anyone who investigates incidents knows the trap: changing the tool does not erase the old trail. And no single brand saves you. The guide recommends DuckDuckGo, and right there in the replies someone pointed out that even that is not absolute. The lesson is not to distrust everything, it is to understand that privacy is not bought once, it is practiced. It is the habit of keeping the parts of you apart, so no one assembles the pieces without effort.
You will not disappear, and anyone who promises you that is selling you the same fantasy the surveillance industry uses to keep you. What these seven days give you is smaller and more powerful: the copy of you they hold starts to rot. You change your habits, you stop feeding the portrait, and after a few months the version of you in their databases stops matching the real person. You become expensive to follow and hard to predict. That has always been the freest thing a person can be.
Sources: Cybernews (the 24 billion figure) and the guide "How to Disappear From the Internet in 7 Days," published on X by an Anonymous account.
#StaySafe
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