Saying goodbye to the internet

A recent survey by NordVPN showed that on top of the list of information that people want to scrub off the Internet is personal financial data. (Illustration by Suneesh K.)

Ubiquitous as the internet is to our lives, most of us have been through moments when we wished we were just not a part of it. A new study by the cybersecurity company NordVPN reveals that more than a third of the people would delete themselves from the internet if they could. The triggers for their disillusionment vary in nature. There’s the 45 percent who said there was no reason for their name to be on the internet, while 42 percent said they felt used because companies collect their data and exploit it to their advantage. Another 34 percent felt that someone would eventually hack their devices, and 31 percent didn’t trust the internet.

The survey’s target group was residents of France, the UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, Japan, and South Korea. While it did not cover India, chances are that Indians, among the most active on the net from countries across the world, will have similar fears, with the likelihood of opting to abandon it altogether under aggravating circumstances.

Top of the list of the kind of information that people surveyed would want to scrub off the net is personal financial data which is something all of us are guilty of sharing at some point without clearly understanding the dangers of doing so. The bank account number mailed to a child or the credit card details shared with a vendor, are a perfect example of that.

But there are other erasures that are equally a priority for people. From that unflattering picture or video that was uploaded in the early days of our social media presence to an older dating profile, there are many things that come back to haunt people. Unfortunately, you can't remove the pictures because that would draw further attention to what is already embarrassing enough and keeping it in place risks discovery by one more person. It is the kind of Catch 22 situation for which people are willing to pay companies lakhs of rupees for subtle removal.

In the NordVPN study, the most popular solution seems to be paying to use the internet anonymously at all times.

For Indians, though, the big bug bear is social media since it is here that the maximum mistakes are made which induce regret later. Last year, e-communication company Reboot Online, used an online analytics tool to figure out the countries whose people are most likely to abandon social media, based on key online searches showing a strong intention to do so. In the research paper it produced, India emerged as the second ranked nation, with an average of 497,940 online searches each month from Indians indicating their willingness to leave social media. Effectively, 0.066 percent of India’s active internet user base of 755,820,000, is keen to quit social media each month. That’s just behind the US, whose internet population is the most likely to do so.

It is a strange paradox, this love-hate relationship that we have with social media. On an average Indians spend nearly five hours a day on their phone, 70 percent of which is devoted to social media. The number for teens and adolescents in the age group 13-19 is even higher. There can’t have been many other phenomena in history which have had such a pervasive influence on people’s lives. Yet, driven perhaps by a single bad experience - the hack of a card or obscene or abusive messages - many young people would like to wipe the slate clean. Which is why most major social media platforms now have a provision for deleting your account. In fact, this April, Google announced that its search engine policy which currently allows people to request the removal of sensitive content that can cause direct harm to them would be expanded to allow people to request for removal of additional types of information when they find it in Search results, including that related to personal contact data like a phone numbers, email or physical addresses.

Every now and then, people express the desire to unplug and go "off-grid". Funnily most such conversations happen on Twitter or WhatsApp or Facebook!