Protecting your identity online is essential for your brand, reputation and credit worthiness, far more important than updating your Instagram and Facebook every day. Several times a year the news will cover a serious data breach of information being held by major banks, insurance companies and/or social media platforms. Once the data is taken, it can be misused or even lead to identity theft. Deleting your old social media aws accounts buy is a vital step to help ensure some measure of identity protection. It is imperative that you keep your online access to your current accounts safe and protected and delete any old accounts.

Here is a guide that will help you delete your old accounts on the most popular social media sites.

Facebook
Moving onto the biggest social network platform of all time, Facebook, with over a billion users, keeps things simple and makes it incredibly easy for you to deactivate your account.

Once you go into the “settings” tab from the down arrow in your browser, select your Facebook information and then select delete your account and information”. When you are in this menu you will go to delete your account and must add the password to confirm.

Foursquare
Foursquare hit the internet over a decade ago to let friends know where you are and figuring out where they are. In order to delete your Foursquare account, you will have to access the platform from your computer. Move onto the “privacy” settings tab where you have to scroll to the end of the page and find an option to delete your account. When you select this option you will go to a page where you need to confirm whether you want to delete your account or not.

Google
Google is the undisputed search engine leader with one of the most interconnected ecosystems. By creating one account for Google you are able to access a plethora of different applications and websites without having to create separate accounts. In order to delete your Google+ or Gmail account, you will need to delete your entire Google account.

Go to “Google account settings” and choose “delete account and services”. There you will see the “delete products” option, where you can access all of your Google applications. You need to sign in to all of the websites first before you can delete your account.

Instagram
Facebook’s younger brother is possibly the most used social media platform by Millennials, according to Hootsuite. Thanks to its focus on visual communication, it is the go-to place in order to find talented artists.

Deleting your account is very simple and takes little time to properly accomplish. While you can manage your privacy settings using the mobile app, you must go through an internet browser in order to delete your account. Simply go to the “delete your account page”, and there you will have to provide a reason for deleting your account. Once you provide the reason, you will provide your password and then select the option to permanently delete the account.