
Just Delete Me – A directory of direct links to delete your account - octosphere
https://backgroundchecks.org/justdeleteme/
======
have_faith
> Hacker News

> Impossible

Not sure how I feel about this one. I think it's a nice gesture to respect
someones wishes to delete their contributions regardless of the technical fact
of external archives etc.

~~~
jnordwick
There is double standard favoring HN. If Reddit or Facebook didn't allow you
to delete your account or comments and said it wanted to maintain a permanent
record of you, they would get eviscerated.

There are many questions going back on HN itself and the answer had always
been no, but from what I understand they have renamed a few accounts. But it
isn't something that they will apparently do for everybody.

~~~
pacala
Reddit doesn't allow you to delete your account either. You can only
"deactivate" it, to delete posts you have to do it manually. Since the
Internet has the attention span of a gnat, I can find no plausible
justification to not delete one's contributions automatically. At most, a site
may delay the delete by a few weeks out of respect for other users. After
that, all conversations have long died and measurably nobody cares. Other than
the Twitter cancel mobs.

~~~
saagarjha
> Since the Internet has the attention span of a gnat, I can find no plausible
> justification to not delete one's contributions automatically.

People often say things that have useful information in them?

~~~
pacala
The number of readers of forum comment decays exponentially over time. Is
anyone reading years old forum comments looking for insights?

~~~
dredmorbius
It happens rarely, but it happens.

The first Usenet posts of Linus regarding Linux, or of Mike Godwin's coinage
of Godwin's Law come to mind.

The question of how to determine cultural relevance is a hard one. Ordinarily,
say, social utterances or discussions wouldn't qualify. If a participant or
subject of that discussion ends up in a socially-significant role (high
office, head of a major company, etc.), that might change.

Contexts vary, and can change over time.

At the same time, records _are_ lost with time, there is a forgetting curve,
and a few high-water marks stand out, though even those crumble in time.

Looking at HN's top-ever stories is an interesting exercise (either Lists or
Algolia's search w/o any terms should give this).

------
_jomo
Useful website, but years out of date and unmaintained.

The actively maintained community fork can be found at
[https://justdeleteme.xyz](https://justdeleteme.xyz).

Repo: [https://github.com/jdm-contrib/jdm](https://github.com/jdm-contrib/jdm)

~~~
LinuxBender
That site says digg is "hard". When digg had a comment structure similar to
reddit, I used to comment quite actively, but too many political types were
following me and creating a weird echo chamber, so I asked them to delete my
account. 15 minutes later, my account and all my comments were gone. Maybe
something changed when they removed that structure, I suppose.

~~~
minitech
When you say you “asked”, do you mean you had to write a message to someone
requesting deletion? Because that counts as hard. Ideally the site should
respect your use of a simple button.

~~~
LinuxBender
Fair point. I submitted feedback to it was a few words and two clicks.

------
vortico
For a minute, I thought these were _direct links_ to delete your account,
meaning that going to these links would delete your account immediately, a bit
like like Super Logout (DO NOT CLICK
[https://superlogout.com/](https://superlogout.com/) OPEN IN INCOGNITO TAB).

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
I'm surprised that isn't blocked by cross-site scripting prevention or
something along those lines. Shouldn't forcing logout require that you have
the cookie that proves that you're logged in in the first place?

~~~
vortico
Any site that has a GET route to /logout that does not check the referrer is
vulnerable to this iframe/img attack.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
It really shouldn't be GET anyways; that's asking for trouble.

~~~
iwalton3
Some of the pages that are exploited do use POST though. If it accepts
authorization through a cookie and doesn't require an XSRF token or JSON
content type, it is probably vulnerable.

But yes in general making actions happen in response to a GET request is
generally a bad idea, since these are often cached and considered "safe" to
retry.

------
namirez
I feel kind of uncomfortable commenting on HN, especially after reading this
answer by Jacques Mattheij [1] with regard to deleting accounts:

> _If this is to ‘unsay’ stuff that you wrote in the past then that’s a good
> reminder to think twice before you hit that submit button lest you cause
> someone needless work._

It sounds like a big "screw you" to me. It would have been way nicer to say
something like "sorry we don't have time/resources to add this feature".

[1] [https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-unofficial-hn-
faq/#deleteacc...](https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-unofficial-hn-
faq/#deleteaccount)

------
paulpauper
I dunno why ppl say it is so hard to delete social media accounts such as
Facebook or Twitter. It is actually very easy to do

get an affiliate link for something like gambling or anything spammy

post it as many places possible as fast as possible

in fact, merely posting any link over and over will nuke your account,
guaranteed.

within minutes or hour max Facebook or Twitter will lockout and ghost your
account for good, erasing all traces of it from existence. That way your
account is gone and maybe you will make some extra $ in the process too.

~~~
adtac
This isn't deleting your account, it's just removing _your_ access to it.
Don't do this. This will prevent you from actually deleting your data in the
future because you're now locked out.

------
fpgaminer
Since the comments are talking about Right to be Forgotten, there was a recent
RadioLab podcast on that very subject:
[https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/radiolab-right-be-
forgotte...](https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/radiolab-right-be-forgotten)

Worth a listen; the focus is mainly on Cleveland'com's right to be forgotten
experiment, where they are redacting or deleting old content when requested on
a case-by-case basis. Regardless of how you feel about right to be forgotten,
the episode makes a number of points both for and against that are worth
hearing.

I'm personally undecided on the issue, but I did come away from that podcast
with one very strong opinion: I hope we as a society make a decision, either
way, and codify it into law (much as the EU has done). Without those laws,
we're forming kangaroo courts where small groups of biased individuals get to
decide _who_ has the right to be forgotten. Yikes.

I would also add the addendum, specifically for the HN audience who more often
than most understand the concept that the "internet forgets nothing." Don't
let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If we do believe the right to be
forgotten is an overall good thing, let's do it, even if the system won't wipe
out _all_ instances of a piece of information. There's a tangible difference
between something being the first Google result versus being on the second
page.

------
19ylram49
As a principle, I never work on products that employ dark patterns, such as
making account deletion hard or impossible, to control their users and/or
content. I find it sad that we even need a directory for what I consider to be
a fundamental option.

~~~
19ylram49
I find it even more sad that this current medium, HN, is guilty of this. Sigh.

------
zxcvbn4038
I’ve always wondered what’s going to happen when CBP finds out I have no
social media accounts. You can’t find me on Facebook, nor follow me on
Twitter, I’m not Linked In, etc. I am a citizen so I think they will just have
to be unhappy about it. But I imagine that before things get to that point
there will be a lot of threatening and posturing.

------
stmw
Glad this is continuing to get attention here on HN. There's an automated paid
service called the same thing -
[https://www.abine.com/deleteme/](https://www.abine.com/deleteme/) \- but it
has blogs with additional info on how to do it yourself, too.

------
morcutt
Thanks for sharing. I just recently deactivated Instagram for ~3 weeks, logged
back in to download my photos, and then tried to deactivate again.

At first, it failed and threw an error message about enabling cookies which
made no sense. Then I got a pathetic error message stating "Sorry, you can
only disable your account once a week. Try again in a few days." Pretty
pathetic.

[https://imgur.com/a/5yHJM1Y](https://imgur.com/a/5yHJM1Y)

------
wakkaflokka
Tangentially related, but I'd love a list of links to places where you can
export your personal data (eg Google Takeout).

------
justin_oaks
How hard is it to get your account closed (not necessarily deleted) on those
services that make it hard or impossible to delete your account?

I know it's not the same, but might be good enough for some purposes.

Perhaps if the service still doesn't close your account upon request, they may
still do it due to terms-of-use violations or service abuse. (evil smirk)

~~~
pcora
they may close if you violate terms. but you can't be sure if the data was
actually deleted. I bet most keep it.

------
jcims
It would be nice if they cataloged the Forgot Password links so folks could
see if they actually have an account at these services.

I've been on the Internet for almost 30 years, they accumulate.

Edit: Just tried hitting forgot password on the first 10 sites. Surprising how
many directly tell you that account doesn't exist.

~~~
andai
I've been thinking of writing a script to go through my emails and make a list
of all the "welcome" emails, which should roughly approximate all the accounts
I registered.

And then another one for "you are now subscribed to our newsletter" lol

~~~
giancarlostoro
To this day I regret having pruned really old emails on some of my email
accounts cause I cant go back. This was long before Gmail had an archiving
feature.

~~~
wyre
As far as I remember, even in beta, Gmail had the option to archive. What set
Gmail apart from other free email services was the large amount of email
storage that was always slowly increasing. I don't remember my first google
addresses but I don't think I've ever needed to delete an email.

~~~
giancarlostoro
I wasn't deleting due to storage, just to clean up my inbox. I was on Gmail
for the beta in 2004 (or was it sooner?) and I don't recall an archive button,
maybe it was just white noise to me at the time, I was a young teenager back
then.

------
Hoasi
Very useful.

Interestingly, with few exceptions, the worse user experience correlates with
the hardest it is to delete a profile.

> GoDaddy Accounts are apparently retained “to comply with [their] legal
> obligations” though you are able to clear out most of your information by
> editing your profile.

That's always a good idea.

------
pcora
This is a nice guide, but it's very outdated. I removed battle.net recently
without much hassle.

~~~
input_sh
So how about fixing it?
[https://github.com/justdeleteme/justdelete.me](https://github.com/justdeleteme/justdelete.me)

~~~
Gaelan
No PRs have been merged since 2017.

------
cjauvin
When you delete (or soft-delete) your Facebook account, it seems there is no
way to also delete your corresponding Messenger account.. I've tried many
times, to no avail.. is it simply possible?

------
xb95
It looks like this web site is unmaintained and incorrect in at least the
Discord case. I see a PR open since 2017, and a comment on it saying 'this
site is unmaintained.'

------
donretag
Now if there was only away to delete your information from recruiters'
databases. I still get cold calls by recruiters who get my number from a ten
year old resume.

------
tehabe
What is this backgroundchecks.org? Last time I saw this site, this wasn't a
part of it. The site itself doesn't give any information about who is behind
it.

~~~
arkovian
Apparently, they have bought it from the original creators, but never updated
it since.

------
arkovian
This is awesome. I was thinking of going through my online accounts and
deleting the ones I don’t use anymore, this is going to make things much
easier!

------
jmsflknr
Amazing that they are still around. I first used it about six or seven years
ago. Haven't seen it mentioned anywhere in a very long time.

~~~
arkovian
The original creators sold it and now it's not longer updated. Last commit on
GitHub is from 2017.

~~~
MYEUHD
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20861577](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20861577)

------
Kip9000
Deleting accounts opens for hijacking and impersonation. Best is to just log
out and abandon them.

------
benbou09
Google is "easy" and Youtube is "impossible". Is this reliable?

------
Yuval_Halevi
Brilliant.

It's a time saver

When someone clicks on one of the links, make sure it opens in a new window.

Could be cool

------
glr
Cannot find NSA website

~~~
adtac
What do you mean, Facebook is right there

------
LocalH
Deletion of _accounts_ , I have no problem with.

But I have a big problem with deletion of _content_ , outside of a window of
time similar to that of editing posts.

My opinion is, if you write it, you publish it, then you don't have the right
to leave such a big hole in a discussion. I'm sick of being on various social
media and seeing "deleted" "deleted" "deleted".

I'm fine with removing your name from the posts, but other than that, if you
say it, you shouldn't be able to run from it.

GDPR isn't some shining beacon of light, it's just a framework of policies set
forth by people of power. GDPR has the potential to be just as damaging as the
improper uses of PII (for example, look at what happened to the comments on a
crapton of MS blogs when they transitioned to a different backend - all the
comments were _wiped_ because it was too much work to both preserve those
comments and ensure GDPR compliance).

~~~
jahewson
That's your opinion. The EU's opinion is that you have the right to be
forgotten - though this is separate from GDPR.

~~~
LocalH
I think the "right to be forgotten" should be limited to certain specific
instances regarding long-ago conduct. I don't understand this desire people
have to participate in society, then try to completely pull out and say "oh,
not only am I not participating, but I want to also _redact every piece of
content I ever wrote_ ". Forget the person, not their contributions.

------
breakingcups
> Backblaze

> Impossible

Now this is disappointing for a backup company. Hope yevp sees this and weighs
in. Is it even impossible for a EU citizen filing a GDPR request?

~~~
arkovian
I think it has to be, otherwise Backblaze is not allowed to offer its services
in the EU.

------
naicuoctavian
Kudos to GDPR obliging companies to allow users to delete their personal data.

~~~
Crinus
People say that but my paranoid side is convinced that no real deletion
happens :-/

~~~
giancarlostoro
Its likely not deleted in backups is my suspicion. I dont know what policies
some companies have in regards to backups.

Also some companies always had the option for years.

One good test might be to create Facebook and instagram accounts, then upload
images, save direct links to those images. Delete the accounts and see.... If
the links work after clearing cache / a few days / weeks / months... Then yeah
they just keep your data but detach it from friends and your email / password.

~~~
Hitton
Indeed it isn't deleted from backups. And according to [1] it doesn't have to
be. In the company I work for it's handled the way that we have a list of
subjects (their id in database) who requested deletion and after restoring any
backup the subjects' data from the list is deleted again.

[1]: [https://www.itgovernance.eu/blog/en/the-gdpr-how-the-
right-t...](https://www.itgovernance.eu/blog/en/the-gdpr-how-the-right-to-be-
forgotten-affects-backups)

~~~
Metus
So do those records get deleted eventually? Or do they live on forever like
some kind of ghost?

