73
The challenge of deleting old online accounts | Loudwhisper (loudwhisper.me)
submitted 5 days ago by loudwhisper@infosec.pub to c/technology@lemmy.world
11 comments fedilink hide all child comments

In the last days I spent a disproportionate amount deleting old accounts I found in my password manager, and mostly because so many companies - despite the GDPR - have rudimentary, manually when not completely nonexistent processes to delete your data.

In this post I describe my process going through about 100 old accounts and trying to delete them all, including a top 10 for the weirdest, funniest or most interesting cases I encountered while doing so.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] obvs@lemmy.world 10 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I've been doing this.

I also realized the importance of not just using a different (strong) password on each site, but using a different email, and using a different username.

I had quite a few accounts to modify/delete, and I realized if I did 5-10 per day that I could accomplish it in less than a few months, with very little stress.

Well, good news. I finished last week.

[-] loudwhisper@infosec.pub 4 points 5 days ago

Congratulations on completing this!

I have indeed moved most accounts to individual aliases. I used to use the same username and similar emails (perhaps grouped like shops@mydomain), but I got no benefit and the username allowed unnecessary correlations.

So alias + random username and I will have much much less trouble in the future. Hopefully!

this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
73 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

73495 readers
3312 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
L4s@hackingne.ws