E.g. you used a service like for job hunting, submitted personal data, landed a job and are now done with it.
Yes, assuming the site allows deleting accounts.
Many don’t have an easy way of deleting accounts. Some won’t delete an account even when making a formal request.
I noticed that with some niche services.
The were some that I wanted to keep but didnt have a way of changing my email adress.
Like why. That can’t be that difficult.Likely bad coding or bad database design.
Best practice is to avoid using email as primary key in the user database, instead use an internal ID, so that an email change can happen without touching the primary key.
Your reply made me think of an alternative to deleting accounts : replace personal information to use a pseudonym and a throwaway email, remove everything that can be removed.
That would help once the badly coded website get hacked or its database get leaked.
Yes, unless that service is the kind of thing you think you might pick up later.
For instance, you might use LinkedIn to find a job, but that can still be something you might need in the future, because it’s unlikely you’ll hold that one job forever, and intermittently posting during your existing job could actually help your future prospects.
By contrast, if you used a random site to create a fancier resume, yeah, that account can go straight in the digital wastebasket when you’re done with it. You can always make a new account if you need to make a new resume, and it probably won’t rely on your old account’s data to get that job done.
Yes, absolutely.
You should especially delete a job-hunting account once you’re done with it. It depends on the site, but it likely has all the info off your resume.
The sites themselves have no reason to delete your data, plus they probably want to sell your data and / or feed it to AI.
We all know these sites have all this data, attracting those who want to hack the site to sell the data themselves.
Deleting accounts doesn’t mean the company deletes your data. Even under GDPR (Everyone else is completely SOL here, I believe), they can keep if it is required for their business, unless you explicitly demand a full deletion.
I have recently tried to remove a lot of accounts from websites I no longer use. A lot of them don’t even have that option, especially forums.
I first change my information then delete it. So IE say my name is Don Brown. I change it to Jack Thorton, wait a few days and then delete.
I change the email address before deleting. If the deletion requires email confirmation, I’ll change it to a disposable email address. Otherwise, I’ll make up an email address with a nonexistent domain name
Absolutely. One mailadress per service. Once a year or so i cycle through everything and delete accounts i don’t need/want. I contact the services that don’t offer deletion of my data directly. I like to think that the little things count.
That makes sense actually.
It is unlikely that the service itself will delete your data. Although if it is one of those job board sites like indeed that try to build a profile and sell it to employers it might make sense to delete your account so your information is no longer forwarded
I do this a lot whenever I have my 5-year cycle of migrating accounts. If I have lost track of and forgotten entirely the purpose of an account I had once made and know it is not essential or required, it is gone.
Unfortunately, there are services and places out there online in which they do not allow you to delete accounts. I wish this would be a federal law of some kind because it would lessen your footprints online. It is bad practice and I automatically label them as data farms because really, what reason do you have to not allow people to delete their accounts? You’re setting people up to be collected in data breaches and therefore your data falls into the hands of someone you wouldn’t want to have it.
I have been using temporary emails for accounts that I don’t think is necessary.
For example, I was trying to mod Stardew Valley and for some reason Nexus Mods requires an account to download, so I just made one using a temporary email and random password.
I’m not gonna delete the account because screw them why would I need an account to download stuff. Imma eat up their storage.
They pay mod authors (like me!) based on unique user downloads. Requiring an account makes it harder to fraudulently inflate numbers, which also benefits the whole community as broadly speaking the most downloaded/endorsed mods are also the best. Bot farming would ruin the site but not paying the most dedicated mod authors would also ruin the site.
