How to disappear without a trace online
Friend requests, status updates and endless tweets – it’s enough to tempt some to disappear from cyberspace without a trace.
The vanishing act is as easy as taking a deep breath and handing over an account number and password.
“Everyone should have the right to disconnect. Seamless connectivity and rich social experience offered by web 2.0 companies are the very antithesis of human freedom,” declare the developers of a killer service aimed at helping users erase their profile from the web.
Victims of cyber bullying, senders of ill-advised online rants about an employer or the fed up can be candidates for withdrawing from Facebook or Twitter.
“Click here to sign out forever,” entices the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine site (suicidemachine.org).
When given a user’s account name and password, a noose of automated scripts erases account information on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn.
In Facebook, which failed to shut down Suicide Machine early last year, the account doesn’t disappear, but gets moved to the Social Network Suiciders group, which currently has 652 members.
Facebook now boasts more than 800 million active users who produce and comment on more than 2 billion posts per day.
Suicide Machine is the brainchild of Moddr, a Dutch artists’ collective. Seppukoo, a similar site successfully shut down by Facebook in 2009, was spawned by an Italian duo.
Seppukoo co-creator Clementi Pestelli treats it as virtual guerilla art.
“We wanted to subvert virtual life and interconnected life,” Pestelli explains. “It’s an example of a strike in the post-industrial society.”
The artist says his team used the same viral marketing techniques that businesses use to attract a following on the Web.
“When a user deactivated the account, an invitation was sent to their friends’ accounts. In one month, we reached 1 million Facebook users, and 20,000 accounts were deactivated,” he boasts.
But, just as there can be consequences for blowing your Twitter stack at your boss, a social-media disappearing act could backfire on users.
“As peer pressure increases and the expectation for the presence of a well-established virtual self grows, those who opt out of these societal norms will face a host of consequences including isolation, distrust and perhaps even sanction,” writes Marc Goodman, an international specialist on Internet security issues.
He believes it’s likely participation in some form of virtual community will soon be expected, “for the common welfare of a society.”
Goodman warns: “Though the idea of a Web 2.0 Suicide Machine may be humorous today, as the virtual self becomes more relevant and central to our lives in the future, eventually society will condemn the idea of virtual suicide and may even rule it to be illegal.”
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