Digital Privacy Guide

How to Check Your Digital Footprint Online

Your digital footprint is the trail of information connected to you online. It can include search results, social profiles, old accounts, email addresses, phone numbers, public records and information collected by data brokers.

You don't need to be a cybersecurity expert to investigate your online presence. A systematic search can reveal information you may have forgotten about or may not realize is publicly available.

Quick answer: Start by searching your full name, email addresses, usernames and phone number. Then check social networks, old accounts, people-search websites and data broker listings. For broader monitoring and removal, specialized privacy services can search databases at a larger scale.

What Can Be Part of Your Digital Footprint?

Your online footprint can contain many different types of information.

Your full name and variations of your name
Email addresses
Phone numbers
Social media profiles
Usernames and online accounts
Photos and other publicly available content
Old websites, forum posts and comments
Public records and directory listings
Information published by data brokers

How to Check Your Digital Footprint

Search your name.
Search your full name in quotation marks and try variations such as your name with your city, employer or other non-sensitive identifying terms. Review several pages of results rather than stopping at the first page.
Search your email addresses.
Search each email address you have used publicly. Look for old profiles, forum accounts, business listings and websites where the address appears.
Check your usernames.
If you regularly use the same username, search for it. Older accounts and profiles can remain visible long after you stop using them.
Check your phone number.
Search for your phone number using different formats. Public directory and people-search websites may associate numbers with names or other information.
Review social media visibility.
Check what an individual who is not connected to you can see on your profiles. Review old posts, profile information, photos and public contact details.
Look for people-search and data broker listings.
Some websites collect information from public and commercial sources and make profiles searchable. These listings can sometimes contain names, approximate locations, relatives, phone numbers and other information.

Why Checking Manually Can Be Difficult

Searching Google and social networks is useful, but it does not provide a complete picture of your online exposure. Information can exist on websites that don't rank prominently in search engines, and data brokers may maintain profiles that are difficult to find manually.

This is one reason people sometimes use dedicated privacy services. These services can search multiple data sources and, depending on the provider, help submit removal requests on a user's behalf.

What to Do If You Find Your Information

Don't panic. First record where the information appears and determine whether the website provides a privacy, opt-out or removal process.

You can often request removal directly from individual websites. For people-search and data broker listings, however, there may be many different sites to check.

If you want help with this process, you can compare data broker removal services and see what each provider actually covers.

Can a Digital Footprint Be Completely Removed?

Not necessarily. Removing information from one website does not guarantee that the same information does not exist somewhere else. New information can also appear over time.

A more realistic goal is to reduce unnecessary public exposure, remove information where possible, secure old accounts and periodically review what is publicly available.