Reducing my online footprint

I am giving serious thought to backing away from the Intertubes, at least a little. I'm actually thinking about closing one of my email accounts. I've had it forever, which could be why it attracts spam the way chum draws in sharks. I checked it this morning: close to 50 messages, none of which are personal. It's all crap from various interest groups and retailers. I tried unsubscribing from some of the political groups, but it didn't help. The useless emails keep coming. It took me a little too long to learn to never give my email when a store clerk requests it. The occasional coupons received are feeble compensation for the deluge of advertising for current sales -- why on earth, for example, does Office Depot feel the need to tell me three times in the same day that paper is on sale? So maybe the thing to do is just get rid of that account.

Although it probably wouldn't help for long. Sooner or later I'd sign up for announcements or news on a different account and the same thing would happen all over again.

I do think, though, that I'm going to close out my LinkedIn account. It makes no sense to have it now that I'm retired. And for sure I really don't care when former co-workers add new contacts or when other Michigan Tech alumni get a discussion going about almost anything. It doesn't matter what the topic is, sooner or later the thread will be hijacked by a bitter white male. MTU has more than its fair share of misogynistic and/or racists asshats who are sure their own careers are being stifled by political correctness promoting women and minorities ahead of them. There lots and lots of bitter engineers out there who thought they'd be running General Motors by the time they were 40 and instead they're stuck making incremental improvements to widgets at a company no one's ever heard of. So it's probably past time to back away from LinkedIn. And once it's gone, a tiny percentage of the crap that had been showing up in the in box for one email account will be gone, too. It's a start.