The challenge of deleting old online accounts

loudwhisper.me

3 points·Wilder7977··3 comments

A potentially serious side-effect of deleting old accounts is that someone else can register under that name. If a third party sends a message to the old account, now your information is up for grabs.

I've got many old email accounts that I would like to cancel, but other people / organizations keep using them to send me mail. Mail that isn't all that important but still I'd rather not have it fall into the wrong hands.

That's a good point, but applies to email accounts or other "addresses" (e.g., chat IDs). Here I am referring almost exclusively to accounts for services and random websites. In fact, I still have ownership of the cringe email account I created in middle school, despite the fact that nothing besides spammers is using it. But as you say, a missed service that sends you an email there, and your data is in someone else's hands.

For other services (say, signal username) there are other controls that prevent this issue, thankfully.

In the last days I spent a disproportionate amount deleting old accounts I found in my password manager, and mostly because so many companies - despite the GDPR - have rudimentary, manually when not completely nonexistent processes to delete your data.

In this post I describe my process going through about 100 old accounts and trying to delete them all, including a top 10 for the weirdest, funniest or most interesting cases I encountered while doing so.

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