Hacker News Reader

I fail to see why people want to delete their accounts when they decide not to use a service any more. Why not simply stop logging in?

With Yammer it at least makes a little sense because there's possibly sensitive business data on there.

But I built and ran a moderately successful Facebook app and people bugged us about it constantly until we built the feature, but the motivations behind wanting to delete an account just baffled (and continues to baffle) me.

View on HN

I think the whole delete your account and in this case your network was motivated by having a tremendous amount of private company information on there. Some of it was harmless, but if given the choice it would be better that it were removed from the servers of what is a third party at the end of the day.

You are 100% correct - that was the exact situation with us. If we're leaving a service, and we were told we were in control of that data, any remotely diligent security process would involve exporting all data on the service in a secure manner, then removing the data from the control of the third party provider.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com