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Comment by adastra | Hacker News Reader

Can I ask how precisely you deleted it? When I tried a few months back, they wouldn't allow a deletion, they would only allow it to be "disabled".

My reason for trying to delete it was also privacy related, although it will seem like a minor thing. It turns out that when you initially sign up, they turn any friend you have on facebook into someone you "follow" on Quora. My list of facebook friends is not public information. The list of people you follow on Quora is. Ergo, they turned a subset of my private friends list into a public list that anyone could see, and without warning.

Again, seems like a minor thing, but in principle it was a privacy violation, so as soon as I realized this I attempted to delete the account.

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You have to email privacy@quora.com

I also deleted my account when news of this nonsense non-feature hit. And their disabling it doesn't earn them back any points in my book.

There's no way to honestly make that move as a mistake. There's no way to 1. implement this feature as an opt-out and 2. do it without any notification to the userbase, as a mistake or as a "failure of communication".

This move can only happen, and only happen the way it did, because there is a core irreconcilable difference between my concept of privacy and theirs.

And as far as I'm concerned, their concept of 'privacy' can go get fucked with a rusty pitchfork.

I emailed this address: privacy@quora.com

With:

"Hi, Can you please delete my account and all data associated with it. I was originally impressed with Quora, but the main issue is that it is hard to navigate and its utility is limited. I do not want my information being passively shared on any service, especially one where I may be looking for answers to confidential questions.

After all, why else would I go to the Internet rather than just asking a friend?"

They deleted my account after about a day. The user experience is as much of a problem for me as the privacy. Navigating that site is probably the most fustrating experience on the web.

Does not seem like a minor thing to me and worthy wanting to leave the system. Emailing them worked for me last week. This behavior reminds me of an early ( now-defunct ) social network which upon a person's registration would attempt a login to their email ( hotmail etc ) using the password ( not encrypted ) that the person used to register on the social network. Upon gaining access to the person's email the system would copy all the email addresses from the archive and begin spamming those users with invitations to the social network. As many naive people do use the same password for many services this attack would often succeed.

Quora ( among others ) seem to be taking advantage of our current naive attitudes about social networking, privacy and sharing. It might seem extreem to compare the email hack to these sharing hacks right now, but I think in time we will come to see that these two infringements have more in common than not.

Gratuitous plug for the Freedom Box Project: http://freedomboxfoundation.org/

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