E.g. you used a service like for job hunting, submitted personal data, landed a job and are now done with it.
I have been using temporary emails for accounts that I don’t think is necessary.
For example, I was trying to mod Stardew Valley and for some reason Nexus Mods requires an account to download, so I just made one using a temporary email and random password.
I’m not gonna delete the account because screw them why would I need an account to download stuff. Imma eat up their storage.
They pay mod authors (like me!) based on unique user downloads. Requiring an account makes it harder to fraudulently inflate numbers, which also benefits the whole community as broadly speaking the most downloaded/endorsed mods are also the best. Bot farming would ruin the site but not paying the most dedicated mod authors would also ruin the site.
I have recently tried to remove a lot of accounts from websites I no longer use. A lot of them don’t even have that option, especially forums.
You should especially delete a job-hunting account once you’re done with it. It depends on the site, but it likely has all the info off your resume.
The sites themselves have no reason to delete your data, plus they probably want to sell your data and / or feed it to AI.
We all know these sites have all this data, attracting those who want to hack the site to sell the data themselves.
More of an example cuz I saw another post here talking about our jpb center.
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.
Yes, absolutely.
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.
