(With a buttload of thanks to @thesecretlifeofpandas. Without her I wouldn’t have found out about this.)

Wanna know how much of your information is publicly available online?  Go to http://www.spokeo.com and type in your name, user ID, and/or city.  Go ahead.  I’ll wait.

Freaked out yet?

Rightie-o then. Spokeo offers an option to get your name, user ID, etc. unlisted.  Head on over to http://www.spokeo.com/optout and follow the instructions.  Preferably for every user ID you have.

The good news is, this gets you unlisted from Spokeo, so it becomes a little difficult from anyone to look up all the information you saw when you looked yourself up.

The bad news is, that information is still publicly available, floating around somewhere in the interwebz.

The worse new is, even when you delete something, like pictures, videos, posts, or accounts, there is a possibility the files and/or information is not physically deleted from the server, and can still be accessed directly.  (Or, even if they are deleted, copies of them are stored in a backup server somewhere, and still accessible by people & programs that know how to access them.)

Anways… back to lurking.