It's refreshing to see that tech is now heading in a more socially responsible direction, but the industry still has a long way to go.
What? Absolutely the opposite is true. Tech is now doing evil shit that was unthinkable ten years ago. Like Facebook using the phone number you put in as part of your 2FA for marketing purposes [1]. The only thing that's happening right now is tech companies are paying more lip service to giving a fuck about users, not actually giving a fuck about them.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/yes-facebook-is-using-your...
what are examples of tech heading in a more socially responsible direction?
These are, of course, unrelated to account deletion, but it shows that big tech is at the very minimum aware that social responsibility is becoming a more important part of business.
As exemplified by, for example, Google firing the two heads of their Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team...who had been researching bias? [1]
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/13/22370158/google-ai-ethics...
Actually deleting accounts means you're losing very valuable information about [past] customers, their behavior, geo, etc. Also some people may suddenly decide to delete their account and request its reactivation after a while.
It also means you cannot use this data for forensics which is not such a rare occurrence.
Storage is cheap, information is expensive.