It is impossible to completely disappear from the internet, and anyone who promises such a result either is mistaken or is selling a service. A realistic goal is formulated differently, namely to reduce the amount of available information enough so that you stop being a convenient target. Scammers work with what lies on the surface, and a person whose address, place of work, family composition, and phone number can be found in five minutes of searching is a much more attractive target than a person about whom only a name can be found. Therefore, the issue is not disappearance, but increasing the cost of collecting information about you.

Start with an Audit

Before deleting anything, you need to understand exactly what is available about you, and it is worth doing this in the mode of an outside observer. Open a browser window in private mode so that the results are not personalized to your account, and start by searching for your own first and last name in quotation marks.

Next, repeat the search in different combinations, that is, the name together with the city, the name together with the name of the place of work, the name together with the phone number, as well as a separate search by phone number and by the email addresses you use. Do not limit yourself to one search engine, since different systems index different pages, and materials that have disappeared from one may remain in another. Check image search by uploading your own photo, because this shows where your images are being used. Check your email address in services that show whether it is present in known data breaches, since breaches are the most common source of information that is then used against you. Make a list of what you found, dividing it into two categories, namely what you can delete yourself and what someone else controls.

What You Will Not Be Able to Remove

Open state registers operate according to the law, and some information in them is available to anyone for a small fee. The Register of Real Estate Rights allows you to check the ownership of a specific person, and, as an MIA representative noted in a comment regarding data leaks, this possibility has officially existed since 2016, while the system records exactly who made the request. Data about entrepreneurial activity is also public, so information about an individual entrepreneur, including the registration address, is available in the state register. Court decisions are published in the Unified State Register of Court Decisions, and although personal data there is partially anonymized, it will not be possible to completely remove a mention of yourself. Declarations of public officials are open by law. News materials about real events in which you appear are also not subject to removal at your request, since reliable information of public interest is protected by freedom of speech.

What Can Actually Be Removed Completely

Old accounts on social networks and services that you no longer use, since they remain indexed and often contain information that you have forgotten about. Profiles on forums, in comments, and on classified-ad websites, including archived listings on marketplaces, where a phone number and residential district are usually indicated. Your own publications on social networks that show more than necessary, and especially those that contain photos of documents, boarding passes, tickets, and other things with numbers. Resumes on job-search websites, which often remain active for years along with the address, date of birth, and full list of places of work. Photos with geotags, since the metadata of a photo may contain the coordinates of the place where it was taken. Privacy settings in active accounts, where it is worth closing access to the friends list, old publications, and information about the place of work and education.

How Removal from Search Results Works

A search engine can remove a page from its results, but it does not delete the page itself from the website where it was published. This means that the material will remain available through a direct link and may be found through other search engines. Because of this, the correct sequence looks like this. First, you achieve the removal or modification of the page itself on the source website, and only then contact the search engine with a request to remove the outdated result from the search results. Google accepts requests to remove results under certain categories, which include contact details, document numbers, bank details, login information, medical records, materials containing threats and calls for harassment, as well as intimate images, including generated ones. Reliable news materials and official public records usually do not fall under these categories. If the page on the website has already been deleted but remains in the search results, there is a separate tool for removing outdated content.

Ukrainian Legal Tools

The Law of Ukraine on the Protection of Personal Data gives the data subject the right to demand its deletion, and Article 15 of this law directly regulates the deletion and destruction of personal data, including data collected in violation of the requirements of the law. In practice, this means that you can contact the data controller directly, that is, the company or website that processes it, with a demand to delete information about you, and in such a request it is worth indicating exactly which data, on which page, and on what grounds you demand its deletion. If the data controller does not respond, the next authority is the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, who exercises control over compliance with legislation on personal data protection and considers citizens' appeals. Separately, there is criminal liability, since Article 182 of the Criminal Code provides punishment for the illegal collection, storage, and dissemination of confidential information about a person. It was under this article that proceedings were opened against anonymous Telegram bots that traded in passport data, identification codes, and addresses of Ukrainians.

About Telegram Bots with Databases

Bots that provide data about any person for a small fee operate using stolen databases, and their activity itself is illegal. It is impossible to remove your data from such databases, since they are distributed uncontrollably and copied between different operators. What can be done in practice is to report such a resource to the cyber police through the official website, since without citizens' reports these cases move slowly. The Ombudsman calls on people not to provide personal data to unverified persons, not to publish documents in open access, and always to check to whom and for what purpose they provide them, and this is the most effective part of the recommendations, because it concerns prevention.

Prevention Is More Important Than Removal

Since removing something that has already been published is always more difficult than preventing information from getting outside, the main work lies in changing habits. Do not publish photos of documents, tickets, boarding passes, and bank cards even partially, since the numbers on them can be restored.

Do not tag your location in real time, and especially do not publish information about leaving home for a long period. Do not indicate your full date of birth in public profiles, because in combination with your name it is a key to many identification procedures. Use a separate email address for registrations on services, leaving the main one for important correspondence.

Periodically delete old accounts that you do not use, instead of simply forgetting about them. Review privacy settings after major service updates, since they are sometimes reset to default values.

About Paid Removal Services

Such services work mainly with American data brokers, that is, with companies like those that collect and sell profiles of U.S. residents, and for a Ukrainian audience this set is almost irrelevant. The main sources of information about Ukrainians have a different nature, namely database leaks, open state registers, and people's own publications on social networks, and no paid foreign service works with this. Therefore, it is better not to spend money here, but to carry out the listed steps yourself.