With the recent exposure of Facebook and their tinkering with people’s privacy there has been a new wave of people looking for ways to be not so exposed on the web……

The UK’s Guardian had a feature that may help those that would like to become a digital ghost……

Early one morning last year, before the birds were up, Tio Bucard, his wife and children skittered down the path from their home in a tiny French village towards a black SUV, its engine running. As Bucard drove to the local airport, he checked his rear-view mirror every few moments to see that he was still being followed by Frank Ahearn, a 54-year-old American with a peppery beard and wraparound sunglasses. Bucard (not his real name) had met Ahearn for the first time only the day before, in the lobby of a Monaco hotel close to Bucard’s office. Now he had entrusted his family’s safety to this former drug addict from the Bronx. Bucard pulled into the airport’s long-term car park. Then he and the family transferred into Ahearn’s hired SUV. As they pulled on to the motorway, Ahearn joked whether, while the family was in hiding, he could look after Bucard’s £5,000 watch, a Bentley Flying B No 3.

The watch was a reminder of more plentiful times. Bucard, who raised capital for a private equity firm, had recently found himself on the wrong end of a bad deal. Problems gathered and the firm began to default on payments. One of the slighted investors had, as Bucard puts it, “a shady past” and angry phone calls soon blackened into threats of physical violence. Fearing for his and his family’s safety, Bucard typed the phrase “how to disappear” into Google. Halfway down the first page of results, he saw Ahearn’s name. A former New York skip tracer – a private investigator who finds people who have “skipped” town – turned professional “disappearer”, Ahearn offers a range of freelance services, everything from helping to restore your privacy on the internet to driving your family across Europe and into a new life.