A few years ago, Ken Crum started getting uncomfortable with how much of his life seemed to be online. The long-time computer programmer was particularly concerned by what companies appeared to know about him.

The amount of personal information was mind-boggling to the 66-year-old Texan, who recently moved from Dallas to the small town of Weatherford. Data brokers were collecting his personal details. Social media was targeting ads at him. Then one day, after shopping at a local home improvement store, he got an email from the company asking how his visit was. While he can't be absolutely certain, he's pretty sure the company used location-tracking on his work phone to find him. 

He found it all unnerving. 

So Crum decided to pull himself off most social media, keeping just his LinkedIn account. He quit using Google in favor of DuckDuckGo, a search engine that promises to protect user privacy. He deleted tracking-prone "app crap" — his words — from his smartphone. And he tried to wrestle as much of his personal information back from the data brokers as possible, paying for a subscription to DeleteMe, a service that helps people remove information from databases. 

"I wanted to get as much of me off the internet as possible," Crum said. (Abine, the company that owns DeleteMe, introduced CNET to Crum.)