One data broker held 3,000 data segments on nearly every American. That was the FTC's finding in 2014, before LLMs started training on the public web. Deletion was always partial. Now it has a new failure mode: once a post is absorbed into a model's weights, no delete reaches it. Machine unlearning remains unsolved at scale, and Carlini et al. showed training data can be extracted back out verbatim. Eric Hughes wrote that privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world. In 2026 that power has to be exercised before you publish, not after. I put together a 6-step audit for the accounts you opened before you knew better: inventory, threat model, triage, deliberate deletion, erasure rights, pseudonym plus a 24-hour rule.

CypherpunkGuide

How Permanent Is Your Social Media Footprint in 2026?

Deleting an account hides it; it does not erase it. Caches, data brokers, archives, and AI training sets keep your past alive — a threat-model-fi...