A typology of internet account deletion
I've taken up the task of trying to clean up my digital footprint. I have a large number of old internet accounts that I don't use anymore and want to delete, mainly for privacy and data security reasons. They're just sitting there in my password manager - hundreds of them! They're things that seem useful, like online accounts for various stores. But in practice they're rarely or never used, and they represent copies of my personal data that is being collected and sold or used for advertising. So, in the spirit of digital minimalism, I want to delete as many of these accounts as possible, and narrow down my digital footprint to a list of accounts and services that are actually serving me in some capacity.
I've been chipping away at this for about a week and have some observations. If you've ever tried to clean up old internet accounts, you've probably noticed that it's not always easy. There's an old resource called justdelete.me that offered guidance for how to delete accounts at various websites. This resource seems out of date now, but I liked how it broke down difficulty of account deletion as Easy, Medium, Hard, or Impossible (!). I wanted to give a similar typology based on my attempts so far.
So in order of progressive difficulty:
The Big Red Button - Easy. You log into the account, go to your account settings, and there's a big red "DELETE ACCOUNT" button. You click it. You're done. Congratulations.
The Secret Menu - Easy-Medium. After logging in and looking at the account settings, you don't see the option to delete your account. You poke around in a help section or maybe do a search, and discover that there is a special self-service portal for requesting a deletion. No big deal. You use that form and you're done.
The Support Email - Medium. You search thoroughly but can't find a straightforward answer on account deletion. Resigned, you email support@some-corp.com and ask if they would please delete your account. After a day or two they do, and you're all good.
The Privacy Policy - Medium-Hard. You search thoroughly but can't find a straightforward answer on account deletion. You email support, but they think you want to cancel a subscription or something. They don't seem to understand what you're talking about. Finally, scratching your head, you click into the Privacy Policy. Ctrl+F "delete". You find specific instructions for how to delete your account, which is a bit complicated because everything is in legalese. There's a special privacy portal, run by a third party company, that you submit a special person data deletion request through. You have to enter some personal information to confirm your account. You might have to wait a few days for the deletion to be processed, but you did it.
The Privacy Email - Hard(-Impossible). Another website, another privacy policy. This time, there is no self-service portal. In order to get your account deleted, you have to email privacy@big-corp.com and request it. Ideally, they process your request quickly. But depending on where you live, it might not be that easy. I've had some websites refuse my request to delete my data, because I don't live in a state with internet privacy legislation that gives me a right to that. This has only happened to me a couple times, but it's frustrating, and frankly feels wrong to me. If I lived in California, or the EU, they would be legally obligated to delete my data, but I'm not that lucky at the moment. This has really been a wake up call to me personally, and I'm going to think more careful about what accounts I create in the future, knowing that in some cases there is no legal way for me to put the toothpaste of my data back in the tube.
The Worst - Impossible. It turns out that there are some websites that have a blanket refusal to delete accounts. I'm not sure how these is legal frankly, but I'm no lawyer. Steam is one such case. But I've also encountered an old-school forum that refused to delete accounts. Additionally, forum posts are considered public data, not private, and so you may not have an easy way to claw those back. I'm accustomed to modern social media like reddit where you can easily delete or edit everything you've ever posted. However some old forums don't support editing or deleting old posts. So it may be stuck there forever. I find that problematic personally, but so it is.
So far my experience has been about 40% Big Red Button, 45% requiring an email request, 10% something else, and 5% The Worst. I really wish it were easier. It should be as easy to delete an account as it is to create it. However, companies are incentivized to hold onto your data as long as possible as it helps their bottom line, so they make it hard.