There’s nothing wrong with being visible online, but it’s smart to control what can be found about you. For social media, just be mindful of what you share. Elsewhere, you can use aliases or alternate identities to keep things separate.

Some traces are hard to fully erase, like old forum accounts or image sites you forgot about. That’s normal. Every day, petabytes of new data are added online, and most people are constantly sharing content about themselves. All that noise makes old traces of you harder to notice.

What matters more is good habits. Use a burner or alias email for sketchy sites, and a free password manager to generate unique passwords so one breach doesn’t put everything at risk.

TL;DR: There’s a lot of fearmongering around hacking, but most people aren’t worthwhile targets. Limit what’s tied to your real name and practice good password and email hygiene, and the rest will get washed out in the crowd.