My experience doing digital footprint cleaning

[Sofly]

Oh hey hi

Recently i had the idea of deleting all my accounts from services and websites i no longer use, which i have a ton of, from one-offs that required accounts, to stuff i'm no longer interested in, the list goes on

Thankfully, i've been saving all my passwords for almost 4 years using Bitwarden (which is an absolute must-have), and so checking in on what services i no longer use is a breeze

I still have a looong way ahead, but i deleted my account on enough sites already to form an opinion on how the experience is going

And what do i think?

By god is this exhausting , sometimes (Like AO3) it's as simple as clicking a button, confirming, and boom, account gone; other times you need to submit a ticket, wait until they read it, explain why you want to do that, etc etc etc

And don't even get me started on emailing as a last ditch effort because the website offers no way of deleting your account on the site itself, not even a mention of it in an FAQ or anything like that; and that's not coming only from shady websites or big companies, sites made with love like AWBW (Advance Wars By Web, a site for playing Advance Wars online) are guilty of this too

It's such a shame that the act of deleting one's account is become more and more of a chore; sure some places offer the option directly like how it was always supposed to be, but other times it feels like sites are either complicating the process enough for it to be barely legal or outright ignoring it

I'm still gonna trudge through this, i'll keep sending e-mails and support tickets if it means there's a little bit less of me in sites where i don't want to be in anymore, no matter how long they take to respond, and i'm also gonna try and record everything i can for Just Delete Me

Like i said, i still have a long way until i'm sure i left no stone unturned (to the best of my abilities), so wish me luck on this journey, and i hope that anyone else who might want to do this has enough patience to endure it

[sharpieBath]

i wish you luck on your journey and i hope it's not too much of a hassle!! 

i've cleaned out some accounts a while back but i'm pretty sure i still have some floatiŋ around for services i only used about one or two times. i've been þinkiŋ about straight up deletiŋ my gmail account soon, which is what most of þose accounts were signed under. i don't like haviŋ ties to google so i really want to do it soon, but because i've done so much stuff wiþ þat email i feel like if i delete it wiþout any sort of preparation i'll regret it

[j]

this is something i have experience with too, so i empathize with the frustration and patience you need to have to leave services behind. it's felt to me like that scene out of the Matrix where Neo wakes up in his pod and has to rip out the cables attached to him.

using Bitwarden has been more of a curse than a blessing for me. password managers are convenient so it's easier to register for sites online. i've transitioned to writing my logins on good old parchment, which takes significantly more effort to edit ergo i think before i hit "sign up"!

i think i've sent about fifteen to twenty emails asking for webkeepers to delete my data. there are many things i've discovered that bug me with the whole process. Patreon, for instance, has taken around a month to delete my account - which is a crazy amount of time for company so structured. some webrings have been difficult to leave, too. some sites that have a whole legal process to adhere to don't accept a simple "delete my account please", so i've been forced to choose between invoking a Right to Erasure or giving up completely and moving onto the next entry. the biggest problem with accounts i've experienced, though, is that i can't delete my account if i've lost a method of two-factor authentication. if a site has stored my banking details, i think i absolutely should be able to press an "OMG I COULD BE IN SERIOUS DANGER 10 YEARS DOWN THE LINE SO PLEASE DELETE MY ACCOUNT THANKS" button.

there's pros to going through all this effort, though. i feel less obliged the fewer sites i've given my email address to. that and i'm getting closer to being able to ditch the internet entirely if i so choose!

[Yaya]

This is so hard! There are a bunch of services you can pay for that will remove you from those "people finding" sites which I found super useful (though they vary on price, etc...) but there isn't anything for old accounts. It would be an amazing service! I wonder if it already exists and I can't find it?

[kingdomcome]

I've cleaned up my online presence many times; deleted accounts, abandoned ones I couldn't delete, completely reinvented myself. And it definitely is way more of a hassle than it should be. I think everyone should have the right to be forgotten, and websites that make it almost impossible to do so are part of the problem. My favorite thing about the web is that it isn't permanent. Websites go down, domain names expire, forums get abandoned. And that's not necessarily a bad thing! I'd imagine the only reason it's so difficult to delete accounts on lots of websites is because your data = money, & companies don't wanna give up that potential revenue. Which sucks for a litany of reasons, privacy concerns being the biggest one.

Anyway, I wish you luck sofly! I hope the journey from here gets much less frustrating and time consuming!

[Elagabalus]

I recognise a lot of this as well. Some pages seem to be outright impossible to find a way to delete accounts from.
Luckily with GDPR emailing them and asking them to delete my account could cause them serious trouble if they don’t apply.

The one page I had the most issue with is mlb.tv they took forever to get back to me for deleting my old account there.