
Just Delete Me – A directory of direct links to delete your accounts - shawndumas
http://justdelete.me/
======
buro9
It's fairly understandable that delete from a retailer is hard. In many places
retailers are under obligation to store records relating to transactions for
things like tax compliance, agreements with credit providers, anti-fraud and
accounting laws. i.e. Amazon

What does delete even mean in these circumstances? The best they're able to do
is just remove your public profile (if such a thing exists) whilst leaving
everything else intact.

It's also understandable that collaborative works have no real delete (as the
end user perceives it). The very nature of a collaborative work means that
removing some contribution from the past could alter the work as it stands
today. i.e. Wikipedia

What's really surprising are the media outlets on the list with the high level
of difficulty. The EU data protection laws only permit a company to retain
that data which is necessary to provide a service, for as long as the service
is provided or the company is obliged (by law) to keep the information. Those
outlets (Gawker) seem to hide under the collaborative works stuff, but if
you've an account but never made a comment then deletion shouldn't be objected
to.

General rules:

If there was a monetary transaction they're going to keep your info but might
delete your public profile.

If it's a collaborative work you might get your profile deleted but all of
your contributions will remain as a public record.

If it's an interaction with the government you're never going to get it
deleted.

~~~
zmk_
What they can and should do is remove all you data that relates to you
excluding invoices (which should just copy your data and not simply reference
it) and logs that you need to keep per some law.

~~~
blowski
Exactly. Since I can buy on some internet retailers without creating an
account, there is no logical reason why another retailer can't delete my
account. I understand that they need to store the invoice, but that could be
stored separately from the marketing database.

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kerkeslager
The way I'm going to use this list is to look up services before I sign up.

I'd also be interested to see if user satisfaction correlates with ease of
quitting. It seems like companies which make it hard for users to quit do so
because many users want to quit. Anecdotally this holds true for the handful
of companies on that list I've used, but I'd like to see some actual stats.

~~~
rogem002
> The way I'm going to use this list is to look up services before I sign up.

You should try the Chrome Extension
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/justdeleteme/hfpof...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/justdeleteme/hfpofkfbabpbbmchmiekfnlcgaedbgcf/details)
I wrote using the JustDelete.me data. It adds a traffic light to the omnibar
indicating if the site is hard to be deleted off.

------
leokun
Deleting an account from Quora, including deleting all your contributions, is
not easy. It requires sending an email and waiting for them to run some script
which can take a long time. So unless Quora changed this, which I doubt, that
page needs to be updated.

~~~
systemtrigger
I requested removal from Quora last week. 27 hours later someone from user
operations emailed me confirming it was done. Perhaps they did improve the
process recently.

~~~
yitchelle
Did they sent you a report showing all the items that were deleted as proof,
or am I just being too paranoid?

~~~
systemtrigger
No report, the email they sent said:

...

We’ve deleted your account information from our end.

However, if you are already in a search engine like Google’s search index,
they won’t know to drop you from it until they try to re-crawl your page, and
unfortunately we don’t have any control over when that will happen. The best
thing to do in the meantime is to directly request removal from Google itself
here:
[https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals](https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals).
Once you have submitted your request(s), you will need to wait for Google to
reindex the pages — this often takes a few days.

...

~~~
chmars
Why doesn't Quora request the removal of such content? It's former content
from its own site after all …

~~~
codezero
Because Google will remove it from their index when they revisit the page
organically. If Google provides a way to programmatically send removal
requests, I'd be happy to hear about it and I will pass it along to the team
that deals with account deletions so we can make it part of our flow.

Right now, I am only aware of the Google webmaster tools where you have to
input each individual link you want removed, and even that request is queued
and takes time, with no guarantee that they will reindex the content.

------
anonova
Starbucks has an odd one.

    
    
        They will not delete your account but upon request they
        can “scramble all of your information so that you don’t
        receive emails and none of your information is available
        to [them] for potential fraud”.

~~~
derefr
Makes sense. Their customer database is likely mostly for supply-chain
management and affiliate marketing. They don't want to _remove_ people,
because it screws up the statistics (e.g. number of visits in the last month.)
So they just irreversibly anonymize your data instead.

------
shitlord
Also useful is namechk.com. I didn't even know I had an account on some of
these sites. It turned out I had a 5 year old reddit account, a 6 year old
account on ebay, and more. Of course, I deleted most of them.

------
wrongc0ntinent
Previous hn entry:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6265613](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6265613)

------
yogo
healthcare.gov should be a good addition to this site, if it's possible.

------
eYsYs
Out of context though but the same story was submitted to HN 4 months ago.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6238053](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6238053),
yet today it clicked. Reminds me of [http://blog.ploki.info/what-if-
successful-posts-on-hackernew...](http://blog.ploki.info/what-if-successful-
posts-on-hackernews-are-just-luck-post-mortem-of-what-if-successful-startups-
are-just-lucky/)

------
Aldo_MX
Skype freaked me

    
    
      Contact customer services. You’ll need to know 5 contacts from your contacts list,
      the month you created your account, and your signup email address.

~~~
nexttimer
Yup, the redder the flag, the sooner you should quit.

Facebook is also on that list.

------
brokenparser
Why is it impossible to delete an HN account?

~~~
codezero
pg has commented on this on HN before, the basic gist is that HN is like a
newsgroup, you've submitted your comments in the public and just like Usenet,
they are there to stay. Separate to that, if you were to delete your account
and its comments, it would leave existing threads confusing and incoherent.

~~~
brokenparser
Do it like how Reddit does it, simply replace instances of $username with
[deleted].

~~~
codezero
This is one way to do it, but it still creates stark discontinuities in
discussion threads.

~~~
blowski
But you can delete threads, right? I frequently see '[deleted]' with replies
to the deleted thread.

------
daGrevis
Comments from previous discussion.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6265613](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6265613)

------
ToastyMallows
[http://www.accountkiller.com/en/](http://www.accountkiller.com/en/) is
another great site.

------
ISeemToBeAVerb
Cool directory. Now if only I could remember all the sites I've set up
accounts with in the past. :-/

------
halcyondaze
Absolutely love this.

