For some of them I kind of lost access so I would need to write emails to instagram or whatever, for others I would need to remember and to access to each one of them and delete them.
The hardest would be gmail with people having my contacts from like 10 years ago…
for myself, if i can recover passwords etc, i delete the account to lower the possibility of that data being used to train ai, and to lower the numbers of registered accounts they have.
i think stakeholders are more likely to see accounts being deleted as worse than an inactive account, because people can always come back to an inactive account.
so many websites are eager to keep users by making it difficult to delete accounts, or by adding a 14 day wait before they’ll delete an account, etc., so that alone makes me think they want even inactive accounts for usage statistics or to steal data from.
I dont think deleting your account actually removes the content from their servers just removes the ability to find it for other users. I imagine companies like meta retain everything you put up and is free to train ai with it.
I would advise against deleting your account. When you delete your account you also forfeit your username which can then be used to impersonate you. While I’m not sure on the exact math, it would seem logical that having a stagnant account keeps up their costs but doesn’t bring in almost anything resulting in a net loss on an account basis.
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A reasonable argument and I agree that impersonation is still possible without the scammer taking the excact username but it’ll still be easier to fool your contacts when you don’t have an active account.
For example consider two worlds - in one you have an instagram account, in the other you don’t. The world in which you have the account, people who only know you through that account and don’t use other platforms where you’re on, are less likely to fall victim to scams because they can always verify that the scammers account isn’t your account. In the other world this isn’t possible and thus it is more likely people who don’t know you directly will believe the scammer.
Also my point on the cost of the account still stands. I do admit that having an open account which gets scraped is an issue but if you have a “private” account, most of the 3rd parties lose access to it’s content. Although I’m sure three letter agencies and meta have a custom API which can query all accounts, public or private, the point you’re trying to make is moot, as if we’re talking about opsec, if you already have an (insta) account, all it’s data is logged somewhere and it likely won’t be deleted in the near future.
With “deletion” you’re simply advancing the moment, they’re supposedly “deleting” your data; something I refuse to believe, they actually do. Instead, I suspect they “anonymize”, or effectively “pseudonymize” the data (as cross-referencing is trivial, when showing equal patterns on a new account; would the need arise). Stagnation wouldn’t require services to take such steps, and any personal data remains connected to you, personally.
For the Gmail account, I would recommend: not deleting the account, opening an account at a privacy-respecting service (using Disroot as an example), connect the Gmail account to an email-client (like Thunderbird), copy all its contents (including ‘sent’ or other specific folders) to a local folder (making sure to back these up periodically), delete all contents from the Gmail server, and simply wait for incoming messages, at the now empty Gmail account.
If a worthy email comes in: copy it over to the local folder, and delete it from the Gmail server. For used services, you could change the contact address to the Disroot account, and for others you could delete them, or simply mark them as spam (and periodically emptying the spam-folder). You may not want to wait for privacy-sensitive services, to finally make an appearance, and change these over to the Disroot address right away.
I’ve been doing this for years now, and my big-tech accounts remain empty most of the time. Do make sure to transfer every folder, and make regular backups!
Send an email to people you care about with your new email, they reply or not it’s OK you still have their email address anyway, no big deal.
Source : I’ve migrated away from GMail.
I would recommend just hiding/removing your content on social media then let it go inactive. There may be some reason in the future you need to utilize the service (looking at you events that are only organized on facebook and restaurants that only post their hours on instagram)
I have an old Facebook account that I’ve lost the password to. I still have access to the email it’s associated with, but to reset the password (and subsequently delete the account) I’d have to prove my identity to Facebook. Which I can’t because I didn’t use my real name.
Now the account is oxidizing on Facebooks servers; I sometimes get “someone tried to log in to your account” emails and I’m like “go, take it, have fun!”.
Basically, if I can I delete old accounts, if I can’t… Well its not my servers that get cluttered with old shit.
My process is to rewrite old posts with generic text like “this message has been deleted” or something along those lines.
Then I choose to delete the post and after some period I would delete the account.
This prevents a company from eating up your past history as AI training data or recovering your deleted posts to some extent.
Editing old posts doesn’t prevent them from being used for training AI data. It would prevent the data from being scraped, but Reddit, X, Meta, etc. are certainly storing all of your edits and training models on them, both internally and for third-parties who are paying for that data.
