You can now delete (almost) all trace of yourself from the web with a click of a button

The internet never forgets. What may have been an embarrassing Facebook photo eight years ago could be dredged up to affect future job prospects, or a tweet on your views about climate change could come back to haunt you when you’re formulating policy.

It is possible to go through and manually remove yourself from sites but this can be a time-consuming task. Swedish website Deseat.me allows people to erase their online footprint with the click of a button.

Designed by two Swedish programmers, Wille Dahlbo and Linus Unnebäck, the site says it helps you ‘clean up your existence’ by collecting all the accounts and deleting them.

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Users sign in with their Google account details and Deseat.me finds all the different online accounts they have, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Evernote. The website then uses Google’s OAuth protocol to access all the data available before providing the customer with delete links for each of their accounts so they can get rid of all their online activity.

WHAT IS ment by GOOGLE'S OAUTH PROTOCOL?

OAuth is an open standard for authorisation, normally used as a way for internet users to log into third-party websites using their Microsoft, Google, Facebook (and so on) accounts without exposing their password.

It isn’t perfect, though. Deseat will only be able to find the accounts that are linked to a Gmail account – so any old accounts that were created using a different email address will not be cleared. And it isn’t possible to completely erase yourself online; any pictures or videos for instance that are available to see through a friend’s Facebook account will still be available even after you have deleted your own account from the site.

It may be slightly disconcerting to allow a website access to all your online accounts before allowing them to be wiped clean. However, the site claims “privacy and data security is something we regard as extremely important”. As Deseat.me uses the Google OAuth protocol, it means that it won’t have access to anyone’s login information, the only thing it finds are the accounts you want to delete.