E.g. you used a service like for job hunting, submitted personal data, landed a job and are now done with it.
I first change my information then delete it. So IE say my name is Don Brown. I change it to Jack Thorton, wait a few days and then delete.
It is unlikely that the service itself will delete your data. Although if it is one of those job board sites like indeed that try to build a profile and sell it to employers it might make sense to delete your account so your information is no longer forwarded
Woah. Some people never need to find a new job?
I do this a lot whenever I have my 5-year cycle of migrating accounts. If I have lost track of and forgotten entirely the purpose of an account I had once made and know it is not essential or required, it is gone.
Unfortunately, there are services and places out there online in which they do not allow you to delete accounts. I wish this would be a federal law of some kind because it would lessen your footprints online. It is bad practice and I automatically label them as data farms because really, what reason do you have to not allow people to delete their accounts? You’re setting people up to be collected in data breaches and therefore your data falls into the hands of someone you wouldn’t want to have it.
Absolutely. One mailadress per service. Once a year or so i cycle through everything and delete accounts i don’t need/want. I contact the services that don’t offer deletion of my data directly. I like to think that the little things count.
Yes, assuming the site allows deleting accounts.
Many don’t have an easy way of deleting accounts. Some won’t delete an account even when making a formal request.
I noticed that with some niche services.
The were some that I wanted to keep but didnt have a way of changing my email adress.
Like why. That can’t be that difficult.Likely bad coding or bad database design.
Best practice is to avoid using email as primary key in the user database, instead use an internal ID, so that an email change can happen without touching the primary key.
Your reply made me think of an alternative to deleting accounts : replace personal information to use a pseudonym and a throwaway email, remove everything that can be removed.
That would help once the badly coded website get hacked or its database get leaked.
Yes, absolutely.
Yes, unless that service is the kind of thing you think you might pick up later.
For instance, you might use LinkedIn to find a job, but that can still be something you might need in the future, because it’s unlikely you’ll hold that one job forever, and intermittently posting during your existing job could actually help your future prospects.
By contrast, if you used a random site to create a fancier resume, yeah, that account can go straight in the digital wastebasket when you’re done with it. You can always make a new account if you need to make a new resume, and it probably won’t rely on your old account’s data to get that job done.
