It isn't really feasible for a service like this, but it would be interesting to know what each of these sites do with your data once your account is deleted. Facebook has recently come under fire for their ghost profiles and I can't imagine they are the only company that keeps data on people who aren't official users.
The only protection against this is to first anonymize your account data, e.g. by entering bogus or empty detail information. Maybe even change your email address to a temporary throwaway address, in case it is needed to complete your account "deletion".
Of course, they could have saved the previous versions of all profiles. But at least you're making it harder for them to check which version was the "correct" one (i.e. the one that has any value on market of personal profiles for spammers, marketing, etc.)
You attempted to reach tosdr.org, but instead you actually reached a server identifying itself as *.5apps.com. This may be caused by a misconfiguration on the server or by something more serious. An attacker on your network could be trying to get you to visit a fake (and potentially harmful) version of tosdr.org.
That sounds great. The only problem is that you just have to accept the word of whatever PR person you talk to at these companies. Not that I really expect them to flat out lie to you, but I wouldn't necessarily expect the whole and complete truth either.
Quora gives me a link to "deactivate" my account but wants me to write a mail to privacy@quora.com for "deleting" my account. Others have reported that the requests sent to this email address are not fulfilled, neither are the mails even replied to.
I want to know the names of assholes in charge of this company so that I can avoid ever working with them.
Quora uses a massive amount of dark patterns. They are huge gaping assholes. I bet they even have a counter-UX engineer whose role is just to design users to enter as much info as possible and never leave the website.
I e-mailed them, then waited a few months, then e-mailed them again, then went through the site manually blanking my answers then deleting them (surprise, the 'delete' button just hides your answer), and only then did I get an e-mail back saying my account had been deleted.
I agree with nileshtrivedi these Quora guys seem like assholes - that's why I decided to delete my account in the first place.
Why do people expect data about themselves to magically disappear from the Internet? One should always assume that everything you communicate online (explicitly or not) has the potential to exist forever.
Because we are talking about proper legal entities here. If I want my data deleted, they should have the means an the will to do so. Nothing "magical" at all.
It is not as if I am asking "the internet" to delete my stuff, but "facebook", "google" or "okcupid".
If they agreed that they would delete everything they know about you at your request, sure. But most of them don't, which means you can't do anything.
Companies should not be forced to implement ways to delete data about users. That's just silly.
Why do you want them to delete the data anyway? To me, it sounds silly and looks like some kind of censorship. Embrace transparency and live with the fact that what is public remains public.
>Skype: Contact customer services. You’ll need to know 5 contacts from your contacts list, the month you created your account, and your signup email address.
Why do I get the feeling asking Skype to cancel your account immediately puts you into a special watchlist?
Given the negative consequences (DoS) of an unauthorized account deactivation, this is actually a fairly reasonable protocol.
The challenge of electronic services is in identifying your customers. Especially when you're doing something allegedly on their behalf. Double-especially when that has permanent state/data loss consequences.
Who the hell knows which month they signed up? I signed up over 6 years ago.
I think it is unfair to expect people to save their original email confirmation mail for upwards to 10 years (skype was released in 2003), especially given that nowhere in the mail it says that this is really important to keep.
A good friend's AOL email account was compromised. They'd been AOL customers (paid) for years, though when the email service went free, they discontinued payment and got broadband service from another provider.
AOL insisted that they give the credit card number that had been associated with the account. A card which hadn't been used and hadn't existed for years. Needless to say, it wasn't available.
For all I know, that email account is still active and valid, though hopefully no critical information is being sent to it.
Again: figuring out how to identify your true customer (or user) is hard.
I canceled my account a week ago, and it wasn't nearly that simple. They paid an agent almost an hour's wage to make it as difficult as possible to delete my account.
The agent kept asking me for personal data such as my birthdate and half the digits of my credit card number. I refused repeatedly (I never recall giving Skype my birthdate in the first place).
Eventually after 55 minutes of discussion, the agent agreed to delete my account if I could provide them 5 of my contacts, the amount of my last bill, and my contact email. Even though you have to be logged in to speak to an agent, and all of these things are fully visible on their website once you are logged in.
Topsy appears to offer a data deletion service at accountremoval@topsy.com. Try asking them to delete their online archive of a defunct G+ account. (Defunct means that the G+ account and its content is deleted.) The service autoresponds to your email entreaty, but nothing is deleted. I have been emailing them for two weeks. The reply is the same:
Re: Please delete my G+ content. I have deleted my G+ account
Topsy Support | AUG 18, 2013 | 09:22PM UTC
Thank you for submitting your request. We have received
your request and are working on responding to you as
soon as possible. If you have any additional information
to add to this case, please reply to this email.
> JustDelete.Me is a directory of urls to delete your account from web services. (Yes, I am aware how terrible that description is. If you’ve got a better one, let me know).
Sounds like a fine description to me. (It's certainly better than average. I find the descriptions of about half of the "take a look at this site" posts on HN to be incomprehensible; it's nice to be able to read a post like this and immediately know what it is talking about.)
So, is something wrong with this description? If so, can anyone tell me what the problem is?
I wish to see a similar site made for changing passwords.
One use case is when the password storage is compromised but also helps when you grow more paranoid over time and need to rotate and max out the passwords.
Given that netflix offers 1 month free subscription, I kinda get why they won't delete accounts completely. Else people could just sign up, delete and sign up again for free netflix.
Since the site doesn’t need anything except a static list in a .json, it would make sense to use a static website generator (e.g. Jekyll) instead of an index.php which loads the JSON file.
What's concerning about companies that don't delete user info is that they don't consider it a liability, or don't believe they can be hacked. If people tell you to delete their PII and you don't, then lose it, isn't that a lawsuit waiting to happen?
> JustDelete.Me is a directory of urls to delete your account from web services. (Yes, I am aware how terrible that description is. If you’ve got a better one, let me know).
How about a variation of "Helping you delete your web accounts"
Can't wait for that EU data protection law to come in that will require services to have a delete option. Self-regulation, as this list shows, isn't working.
I find it extremely frustrating that services like Gravatar and forums didn't inform me that I won't be able to wipe clean my account. It is not acceptable.
Especially gravatar which is capable of building a profile across every website that uses them without caching avatar images locally. Even for non-users, even retroactively.
There's a reason why I add some "+semirandomstring" to the userpart of my email address when writing comments (and hope that "helpful" services don't strip it out before md5'ing it for gravatar).
There used to be a feature rather much like that on the (now defunct) Internet Junkbuster site.
A pretty simple set of form letters you could automatically fill out and have submitted to the major credit bureaus, marketing agencies, and the (then) handful of companies which maintained active marketing lists.
I printed and mailed a small sheaf of letters based on this during the summer of 2001. A month or so later, 9/11 hit, followed by the anthrax mailing scare. I was rather happy to have had far less junk mail to sort through, given the mood of the times -- every piece of mail not received was one more bit of dread avoided.
The results of that persisted for years. I've also avoided using permanent change-of-address forms from the USPS (the data from that is used to, you guessed it, update marketing lists). Having dropped use of credit cards, I've had no credit report for years (occasionally a minor hassle, but actually somewhat nice), and what data does exist is a very jumbled scramble of mostly highly outdated addresses and locations. I prefer it that way.
I don't see how doing that deletes your account or your data for that matter. From what I understand it just shows you content that was 'supposedly' deleted but in fact it was just hidden.
