12 ms·

Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions

157 points by nathan_phoenix 5y ago

esturk 5y ago
Is it name and shame time? Cause I know Walgreens doesn't even have the option to allow you to request deleting your online account. Not an online option nor even calling them on the phone.
- Ansil849 5y ago
  > Is it name and shame time? I feel like this will basically be "pretty much every company out there". A more useful list might be companies who actually do truly delete accounts.
blibble 5y ago
I still get mountains of crap from a google workspace account I deleted a year ago - google play developer updates - google cloud service updates - your billing info has expired! update it now or else! despite the fact I can't log into the account because it doesn't exist I suppose actually deleting anything goes against google's DNA
- d2wa 5y ago
  I've also had no luck getting Google to delete an unused Developer Account. They suggest I stop using my Google account and create a new one; abandoning all services in the process.
mrintellectual 5y ago
Part of this is leftover tech culture from Facebook's early focus on Growth, Growth, and more Growth. Allowing for easy deletion of accounts was fundamentally at odds with user growth. It's refreshing to see that tech is now heading in a more socially responsible direction, but the industry still has a long way to go.
- gumby 5y ago
  I don't understand what a bunch of random companies have to do with facebook. In fact this problem predates the WWW...and predates the Internet!
- itvision 5y ago
  It's almost never been about growth. Actually deleting accounts means you're losing very valuable information about [past] customers, their behavior, geo, etc. Also some people may suddenly decide to delete their account and request its reactivation after a while. It also means you cannot use this data for forensics which is not such a rare occurrence. Storage is cheap, information is expensive.
- fsckboy 5y ago
  > It's refreshing to see that tech is now heading in a more socially responsible direction what are examples of tech heading in a more socially responsible direction?
  - mrintellectual 5y ago
    Datacenter carbon neutrality and de-biasing ML models are two that I can recall off the top of my head. These are, of course, unrelated to account deletion, but it shows that big tech is at the very minimum aware that social responsibility is becoming a more important part of business.
    - Ansil849 5y ago
      > de-biasing ML models As exemplified by, for example, Google firing the two heads of their Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team...who had been researching bias? [1] [1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/13/22370158/google-ai-ethics-timnit-gebru-margaret-mitchell-firing-reputation https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/13/22370158/google-ai-ethics...
      - emteycz 5y ago
        Are these two the only people who study bias in the world?
ShakataGaNai 5y ago
This is super duper common. Most companies that I've run across don't actually have a mechanism for properly deleting accounts. My anecdote: Collage.com - I tried it, was unsatisfied with the results so I requested that they delete my account under CCPA (being a Californian). They said they completed. My account was renamed from email@domain.com to email@domain.com-deleted12344843223432 . My session wasn't even terminated, so not only could I see this, I could still see my not-deleted photos AND all the sharing links still worked. I fought with them at length and their support insisted it was deleted and that this was just something on my computer. Logout/clear cookies/cache/reboot and it'll be all good. I know that's BS. Even when they "escalated" the issue to a manager who said "Your account has been deleted and will not be reopened." - I could still take screenshots of my account homepage. At which point they stopped responding to me.
- hereforphone 5y ago
  Name and shame. And please take the time to file a complaint.
  - ShakataGaNai 5y ago
    The afore mentioned Collage.com - I'm not afraid of naming companies that willfully and flagrantly violate the law. And yes, I should have filed a complaint with the California AG but I never did for unrelated reasons. Too late now.
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    Complaints don't do anything. We need people filing lawsuits. Politicians don't care, they are in bed with businesses and information collection companies.
  - vkou 5y ago
    Naming and shaming on a techie forum does nothing. People spent over a decade grousing about Micro$$$$oft on Slashdot to no effect. Regulators and legislators are the only people who can do something about this. If you want to make a difference, politick, vote, or lobby.
itvision 5y ago
I've worked for several companies and let me tell you the truth: * accounts are never deleted, period * At most there's a column in the table which specifies whether the account is alive or not. That's it.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Confluence even explicitly does this - you can do a “gdpr delete” which disables the user and replaces all info with random strings. It’s kind of hilarious.
  - naoqj 5y ago
    I remember a service that I used 10 years ago that would do something like that. You would request to delete your account but it wouldn't work well as you stayed logged in; if you looked at your account panel most of your info was changed to random strings, including your email.
  - organsnyder 5y ago
    As long as all PII is purged in this process (tricky to guarantee with software like Confluence that is entirely dedicated to hosting user-generated data), that could be compliant.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      Technically the foreign key relationships could themselves be considered identifying data.
      - EdwardDiego 5y ago
        How do you mean?
        Nextgrid 5y ago
        Let’s imagine you’re a modern bank and associate card transactions with the merchant. Even if you sanitize/delete the account holder record, you can’t delete the transactions themselves (as it would screw up your accounting) nor the merchant association. Now let’s say you have a very particular customer that always goes to a very specific restaurant at pretty much the same time every day consistently. That pattern alone is enough to single out that particular person (and deanonymize them by correlating with other records such as cell phone location data, etc).
zero_k 5y ago
The company I know handles account "deletions" by pseudonymizing data, which is utter BS, any half-competent engineer can recover who the original person was. The engineering lead in charge realized he can get promoted by calling pseudonymization "anonymization" thereby fooling most, and not losing the data for the company. Those who knew he was making a mess were not included in the data deletion project, likely because it was inconvenient to hear the truth. So that's how a huge company deals with "data deletion". I hope the DPA will come down on them hard but of course this clown will then just go and do this circus at another company, now promoted to high heavens. I hate that privacy and security are full of snake oil peddlers, and it pays of extremely handsomely to be a snake oil peddler. It's not in anyone's interest for you to get caught (who wants to advertise their security is bad/they don't abide by GDPR?), so even if it becomes painfully obvious you've been selling snake oil, you'll only be asked to hand in your resignation, allowing you to do the same (but at an even higher level) at another company.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  One reason deletion may not be technically absolute is that tombstone records may be needed to gradually cull the data from things like backups and 3P systems. Usually though these should just be surrogate keys with no human significance. Then ultimately they get purged too.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    The danger with surrogate keys and pseudonymization/tokenization is that the mere patterns in the data such as foreign key relationships may be enough to uniquely identify someone.
    - paulryanrogers 5y ago
      If the tombstones are barren enough there may not any/enough relations or metadata for that. And ideally even the tombstones get removed once related records and 3P copies have been wiped.
Ansil849 5y ago
Before requesting an account "deletion" for an account you have anywhere, always go through every single field and enter fictitious data. This includes adding fictitious photos and the like. The service may keep the previous iterations of the data, sure, but that's less likely than them keeping the latest version of the data, which is almost a certainty.
- itvision 5y ago
  And precisely for that reason many companies nowadays don't allow to edit/modify certain fields unless you request support and provide a proof of your identity.
  - Ansil849 5y ago
    Yes, sometimes this requires sending a fictitious identification image to customer support.
motohagiography 5y ago
I had a service provider delete the hosted graph databases I used for my startup demo that even had some past consulting client data in them, while still continuing to charge me for several months for the service. Since I didn't believe anyone actually deleted data, I asked for a download of it, and they insisted it was actually deleted. It was absolutely shadey. Tainted my view of that technology as well. Valuable lesson was next project I will likely have to figure out how to effectively shard and round robin containers across diverse cloud providers, as I don't forsee ever affording to be able to be treated that poorly again.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
The app I'm writing does this very well. That's because Apple requires it. They won't approve my app, unless there's a "full-fat delete" option. If a user of the app deletes, it completely nukes their entire account, down to the last byte.
- grishka 5y ago
  Depending on the service, it's not always possible, or even desirable, to fully delete an account. For example, if something has an important social part to it, do you also delete the comments that user has left on other people's content? Or their messages in chats? If you do, then discussions end up broken. If you don't, this isn't really a "full deletion". Most social services I've seen do the latter. Some replace the name with "deleted user".
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    I’d have to look at what Apple requires, but I think deleting comments is good (maybe replacing them with a slug). That’s considered heresy, though, by today’s “data is money” crowd. I have seen apps that delete an entire thread, when a root comment is deleted; including responses by other people. I think SMF did that. In the case of our app, we leave communication between users to other apps (like Mail and Messages), so we sidestep that problem. Actually, the reason we deliberately push communication out to other apps, is so we’re not on the hook for it. There’s no reason for us to have the users communicating with each other, via our app. Long story, but privacy is a real big deal, with our user base. I’m super tinfoil about security.
    - giraffe_lady 5y ago
      It's also considered heresy by HN, which doesn't remove comments of deleted accounts.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
        I think this crowd would not react well, to that. May also be technical limitations. Not so easy to do that.
taf2 5y ago
It’s software not magic. We focus on the happy path … there is rarely maligned intent here it’s just a matter of focus… I’d say if gdpr did any good it was in forcing many to be like fine we’ll devote resources to deleting data we’d otherwise probably only brother to if our db size became too big to deal with… it’s the build big and sell to someone else to deal with problem … we just don’t focus on the negative less fun problems
jbverschoor 5y ago
Many companies just as some bodyguards to the login email
- jbverschoor 5y ago
  ... was supposed to say: just add some bogus chars I requested an account deletion, and because my cookies and session were still active, they simply changed to xxxxxxxxx@xxxx.xxx
barbazoo 5y ago
> 2 services moved my account to a different email address instead of deleting it. I was only able to detect this because they changed the mailbox part (the bit in front of the @ sign) but left the domain unchanged. I capture all incoming emails to my domain, so I saw email-change confirmation emails and other emails arriving at the new unexpected addresses. That's sketchy, especially if you don't own the domain but you're on a multi tenant domain like Gmail
- AnonC 5y ago
  AFAIK, with the default domains owned by the email providers, Gmail and Yahoo don’t recycle unused/deleted gmail/yahoo addresses ever (whereas other paid providers like Fastmail, Posteo, etc., do recycle within a few months or in a year or so). One needs to be wary of address recycling policies while using somebody else’s domain.
  - paranoidrobot 5y ago
    This is talking about registering with example@gmail.com on ServiceX. Then you ask ServiceX to delete your account, and they instead change your email address to example-deleted@gmail.com or something like that. I doubt GMail are going to stop you registering accounts that have arbitrary portions of your email being another registered user.
    - AnonC 5y ago
      GP here. I understood that part on later reflection. Yes, any random name-deleted address could be registered by someone else. I’m unable to edit my previous comment now and correct it. Will add a note as a reply anyway.
  - AnonC 5y ago
    I’m unable to edit my comment above, but I understood the problem of changing the email address (even to something like name-deleted, since it could be claimed or already registered by someone else). In this context, my comment above is pointless. :( Thanks also to @paranoidrobot for the additional explanation.
odonnellryan 5y ago
Is no one mentioning how you cannot delete your account on HN? :)
- bombcar 5y ago
  Account deletion is available on HN Gold over ipv6 only.
- notRobot 5y ago
  You can, you just have to email the mods.
ehnto 5y ago
I guess it can get complicated, but most of the software I've written I gracefully handle missing user relationships so that it's possible to delete the user. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of these circumstances are just because the software can't handle a missing user relationship, nothing nefarious. Stupidity before malice and all that.
jack335 5y ago
Thanks for that overview! I still don't get it how businesses even in these days can make it hard for you do delete your account.
dschuetz 5y ago
Is it possible in Germany to file a GDPR violation against vendors who outright refuse deletion or fail to comply otherwise?
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  It should be possible to complain to your local data protection authority. Whether they'll do anything tangible about it is another matter (in the UK the answer is absolutely not), and same for whether they are able to do anything tangible about it (good luck if the offender is shielded behind the crooked Irish DPA).
- Allypost 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure you can file a complaint with any company that operates in Germany (or other GDPR-supporting countries). AFAIK it does not matter where they're registered, only that they provide services in your country.
  - dschuetz 5y ago
    I wonder if I can automate this...
swiftcoder 5y ago
> The last successful request was processed 71 days after the first email. The GDPR doesn’t define “without undue delay”, but I’m fairly certain that it requires companies to not stall for over 10 weeks. Having worked at a couple of cloud companies... the GDPR deletion timeline within our systems was 90 days. I assume that legal had vetted that timeline.
rav 5y ago
The post paints a discouraging picture overall, but it does have some interesting double standards if you consider these three separate quotes: > It would seem there is no end to how far businesses can take white-labeling and outsourcing. > I’m sure engineering time to manually delete data must be more expensive in the long run than creating processes and tools for customers and customer support representatives to handle delectation requests. > 11 of these were smaller niche online stores. If I'm a "niche online store", am I somehow excused from these rules? I would think there would be a market for white-labeled online stores for niche online stores, but that's somehow Bad™? But having an in-house engineering team develop the platform and respond to development needs as they arise (to handle the first account deletion request) is also Bad™?
- theknocker 5y ago
av501 5y ago
It is a function of incentives and punishments. The nature of the company you are in and the risk the org is willing to bear plays out. I work for one that puts in a lot of effort to get rid of all the user data if they request a deletion based on the laws of the country they are from which we can expand to any user as needed. Whenever we have found gaps in our existing data storage, we go back and really try to clean it up. However there is a lot of legacy that surfaces out time to time. The reality is doing this is messy and is going to remain so for some time. One cannot suddenly start after years of no incentives in the online economy to do this and get to cover all areas without huge cost. This requires giving up competitive advantage today. Mid to small organisations that were beyond startup state but not yet having 1000's of engineers, which have to balance growth and operational aspects are left in the most difficult situation. As the laws started taking hold, their incentive structure is still not fully aligned with this as the digital economy does not yet reward them for this enough nor does enforcement create a large enough risk yet. Same thing plays out with some of the larger orgs, just that they have more lawyers to help them stall this as humans are always biased to keep the status quo if it is beneficial to them. Personally I think we've had a start but its going to take some time to get to where we need to be. I really applaud the idea of the privacy laws and the intent behind them. Its just that one has to recognise we won't be getting to a state of good behaviour within a few years after a couple of decades of not having those requirements baked in from the get go. Old habits have to be replaced as well. The enforcement is hard and that will be something that has to be bubbled upwards from the ground up by users themselves to create a digital economy where consumers/users reward those that respect their privacy. It is just not yet that way today, so why would the organisations change? The risk is low as enforcement is hard and the user demand is not enough. Most successful would be attempts by large organisations such as Apple and laws like GDPR which forces developers and companies to change their thinking. By asking for change and continuing to iterate on that you can start seeing a slow move towards development practices that will have privacy by default. You need the whole chain of actors to move towards this: The product managers, the engineering leads and architects, the decision makers, the risk assessors. Once enforcement is more steady alongside more demand from users the balance will come. All of this moves slowly whether we like it or not. (edit - grammar and made some long sentences shorted)
osener 5y ago
I wonder how this is supposed to work with workplace apps such as Slack, especially with regards to GDPR. Say I am leaving my job, and want my personal information to be purged from this 3rd party service (Slack). They say [1] "Primary Owners of a workspace or org must contact Slack to request deletion of a deactivated member's profile information.". What if I contact the "Primary Owner" before leaving my job and they ignore my request, or better yet I have already left my job and I don't know how to contact them or who they are? Why can't I request my personal information to be deleted from a completely 3rd party American company's database myself? [1] https://slack.com/help/articles/360000360443-Delete-profile-information-from-Slack https://slack.com/help/articles/360000360443-Delete-profile-...
- aneeshnl 5y ago
  If you are using company account, company owns the data. The data produced during company time is company's property. Company has to request for deletion. Slack is right about it.
  - osener 5y ago
    This makes me ask more questions: - Is my full name, birth date, telephone number, job and other details Slack collects company property? - Can they also sell this to other 3rd parties along with my social security number which was also collected by the company during company time? - Is Slack also free to sell this data to other parties afterwards? - Does GDPR protect your personal information if you gave it away during your free / unemployed time using your personally owned devices and only to services you have admin access to?
xyst 5y ago
Had a similar terrible experience with crypto.com. After the MFA and stolen digital assets debacle earlier this year, decided to [hard/soft] delete my account with them. The company has a very complicated process for account deletions which involves having the account owner send a picture of themselves holding a sign. The picture must meet several criteria in order to be accepted. https://help.crypto.com/en/articles/3640569-how-to-close-crypto-com-account https://help.crypto.com/en/articles/3640569-how-to-close-cry... (note: as of today the link to their selfie requirements is dead) The entire process took 45 days to resolve because their e-mail support is fucking terrible.
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
My favorite in the bad old days was ETrade. They wanted money to delete your account - $80! Fortunately they had an 'ETrade checks' feature, so I wrote myself a check on my account for the entire total, directed their email to the trash and threw their snail-mail away for 2 years before it dried up.
throwaway22032 5y ago
Data once out is out. Period. Try telling a friend a sufficiently spicy secret and then tell me there's a delete. It's just as much a falsehood as imagining you can un-break a window.

Is it name and shame time? Cause I know Walgreens doesn't even have the option to allow you to request deleting your online account. Not an online option nor even calling them on the phone.

Ansil849 5y ago
> Is it name and shame time? I feel like this will basically be "pretty much every company out there". A more useful list might be companies who actually do truly delete accounts.

blibble 5y ago

I still get mountains of crap from a google workspace account I deleted a year ago - google play developer updates - google cloud service updates - your billing info has expired! update it now or else! despite the fact I can't log into the account because it doesn't exist I suppose actually deleting anything goes against google's DNA

d2wa 5y ago
I've also had no luck getting Google to delete an unused Developer Account. They suggest I stop using my Google account and create a new one; abandoning all services in the process.

mrintellectual 5y ago

Part of this is leftover tech culture from Facebook's early focus on Growth, Growth, and more Growth. Allowing for easy deletion of accounts was fundamentally at odds with user growth. It's refreshing to see that tech is now heading in a more socially responsible direction, but the industry still has a long way to go.

gumby 5y ago
I don't understand what a bunch of random companies have to do with facebook. In fact this problem predates the WWW...and predates the Internet!
itvision 5y ago
It's almost never been about growth. Actually deleting accounts means you're losing very valuable information about [past] customers, their behavior, geo, etc. Also some people may suddenly decide to delete their account and request its reactivation after a while. It also means you cannot use this data for forensics which is not such a rare occurrence. Storage is cheap, information is expensive.
fsckboy 5y ago
> It's refreshing to see that tech is now heading in a more socially responsible direction what are examples of tech heading in a more socially responsible direction?
- mrintellectual 5y ago
  Datacenter carbon neutrality and de-biasing ML models are two that I can recall off the top of my head. These are, of course, unrelated to account deletion, but it shows that big tech is at the very minimum aware that social responsibility is becoming a more important part of business.
  - Ansil849 5y ago
    > de-biasing ML models As exemplified by, for example, Google firing the two heads of their Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team...who had been researching bias? [1] [1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/13/22370158/google-ai-ethics-timnit-gebru-margaret-mitchell-firing-reputation https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/13/22370158/google-ai-ethics...
    - emteycz 5y ago
      Are these two the only people who study bias in the world?

ShakataGaNai 5y ago

This is super duper common. Most companies that I've run across don't actually have a mechanism for properly deleting accounts. My anecdote: Collage.com - I tried it, was unsatisfied with the results so I requested that they delete my account under CCPA (being a Californian). They said they completed. My account was renamed from email@domain.com to email@domain.com-deleted12344843223432 . My session wasn't even terminated, so not only could I see this, I could still see my not-deleted photos AND all the sharing links still worked. I fought with them at length and their support insisted it was deleted and that this was just something on my computer. Logout/clear cookies/cache/reboot and it'll be all good. I know that's BS. Even when they "escalated" the issue to a manager who said "Your account has been deleted and will not be reopened." - I could still take screenshots of my account homepage. At which point they stopped responding to me.

hereforphone 5y ago
Name and shame. And please take the time to file a complaint.
- ShakataGaNai 5y ago
  The afore mentioned Collage.com - I'm not afraid of naming companies that willfully and flagrantly violate the law. And yes, I should have filed a complaint with the California AG but I never did for unrelated reasons. Too late now.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Complaints don't do anything. We need people filing lawsuits. Politicians don't care, they are in bed with businesses and information collection companies.
- vkou 5y ago
  Naming and shaming on a techie forum does nothing. People spent over a decade grousing about Micro$$$$oft on Slashdot to no effect. Regulators and legislators are the only people who can do something about this. If you want to make a difference, politick, vote, or lobby.

itvision 5y ago

I've worked for several companies and let me tell you the truth: * accounts are never deleted, period * At most there's a column in the table which specifies whether the account is alive or not. That's it.

bombcar 5y ago
Confluence even explicitly does this - you can do a “gdpr delete” which disables the user and replaces all info with random strings. It’s kind of hilarious.
- naoqj 5y ago
  I remember a service that I used 10 years ago that would do something like that. You would request to delete your account but it wouldn't work well as you stayed logged in; if you looked at your account panel most of your info was changed to random strings, including your email.
- organsnyder 5y ago
  As long as all PII is purged in this process (tricky to guarantee with software like Confluence that is entirely dedicated to hosting user-generated data), that could be compliant.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Technically the foreign key relationships could themselves be considered identifying data.
    - EdwardDiego 5y ago
      How do you mean?
      - Nextgrid 5y ago
        Let’s imagine you’re a modern bank and associate card transactions with the merchant. Even if you sanitize/delete the account holder record, you can’t delete the transactions themselves (as it would screw up your accounting) nor the merchant association. Now let’s say you have a very particular customer that always goes to a very specific restaurant at pretty much the same time every day consistently. That pattern alone is enough to single out that particular person (and deanonymize them by correlating with other records such as cell phone location data, etc).

zero_k 5y ago

The company I know handles account "deletions" by pseudonymizing data, which is utter BS, any half-competent engineer can recover who the original person was. The engineering lead in charge realized he can get promoted by calling pseudonymization "anonymization" thereby fooling most, and not losing the data for the company. Those who knew he was making a mess were not included in the data deletion project, likely because it was inconvenient to hear the truth. So that's how a huge company deals with "data deletion". I hope the DPA will come down on them hard but of course this clown will then just go and do this circus at another company, now promoted to high heavens. I hate that privacy and security are full of snake oil peddlers, and it pays of extremely handsomely to be a snake oil peddler. It's not in anyone's interest for you to get caught (who wants to advertise their security is bad/they don't abide by GDPR?), so even if it becomes painfully obvious you've been selling snake oil, you'll only be asked to hand in your resignation, allowing you to do the same (but at an even higher level) at another company.

paulryanrogers 5y ago
One reason deletion may not be technically absolute is that tombstone records may be needed to gradually cull the data from things like backups and 3P systems. Usually though these should just be surrogate keys with no human significance. Then ultimately they get purged too.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  The danger with surrogate keys and pseudonymization/tokenization is that the mere patterns in the data such as foreign key relationships may be enough to uniquely identify someone.
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    If the tombstones are barren enough there may not any/enough relations or metadata for that. And ideally even the tombstones get removed once related records and 3P copies have been wiped.

Ansil849 5y ago

Before requesting an account "deletion" for an account you have anywhere, always go through every single field and enter fictitious data. This includes adding fictitious photos and the like. The service may keep the previous iterations of the data, sure, but that's less likely than them keeping the latest version of the data, which is almost a certainty.

itvision 5y ago
And precisely for that reason many companies nowadays don't allow to edit/modify certain fields unless you request support and provide a proof of your identity.
- Ansil849 5y ago
  Yes, sometimes this requires sending a fictitious identification image to customer support.

motohagiography 5y ago

I had a service provider delete the hosted graph databases I used for my startup demo that even had some past consulting client data in them, while still continuing to charge me for several months for the service. Since I didn't believe anyone actually deleted data, I asked for a download of it, and they insisted it was actually deleted. It was absolutely shadey. Tainted my view of that technology as well. Valuable lesson was next project I will likely have to figure out how to effectively shard and round robin containers across diverse cloud providers, as I don't forsee ever affording to be able to be treated that poorly again.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

The app I'm writing does this very well. That's because Apple requires it. They won't approve my app, unless there's a "full-fat delete" option. If a user of the app deletes, it completely nukes their entire account, down to the last byte.

grishka 5y ago
Depending on the service, it's not always possible, or even desirable, to fully delete an account. For example, if something has an important social part to it, do you also delete the comments that user has left on other people's content? Or their messages in chats? If you do, then discussions end up broken. If you don't, this isn't really a "full deletion". Most social services I've seen do the latter. Some replace the name with "deleted user".
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  I’d have to look at what Apple requires, but I think deleting comments is good (maybe replacing them with a slug). That’s considered heresy, though, by today’s “data is money” crowd. I have seen apps that delete an entire thread, when a root comment is deleted; including responses by other people. I think SMF did that. In the case of our app, we leave communication between users to other apps (like Mail and Messages), so we sidestep that problem. Actually, the reason we deliberately push communication out to other apps, is so we’re not on the hook for it. There’s no reason for us to have the users communicating with each other, via our app. Long story, but privacy is a real big deal, with our user base. I’m super tinfoil about security.
  - giraffe_lady 5y ago
    It's also considered heresy by HN, which doesn't remove comments of deleted accounts.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
      I think this crowd would not react well, to that. May also be technical limitations. Not so easy to do that.

taf2 5y ago

It’s software not magic. We focus on the happy path … there is rarely maligned intent here it’s just a matter of focus… I’d say if gdpr did any good it was in forcing many to be like fine we’ll devote resources to deleting data we’d otherwise probably only brother to if our db size became too big to deal with… it’s the build big and sell to someone else to deal with problem … we just don’t focus on the negative less fun problems

jbverschoor 5y ago

Many companies just as some bodyguards to the login email

jbverschoor 5y ago
... was supposed to say: just add some bogus chars I requested an account deletion, and because my cookies and session were still active, they simply changed to xxxxxxxxx@xxxx.xxx

barbazoo 5y ago

> 2 services moved my account to a different email address instead of deleting it. I was only able to detect this because they changed the mailbox part (the bit in front of the @ sign) but left the domain unchanged. I capture all incoming emails to my domain, so I saw email-change confirmation emails and other emails arriving at the new unexpected addresses. That's sketchy, especially if you don't own the domain but you're on a multi tenant domain like Gmail

AnonC 5y ago
AFAIK, with the default domains owned by the email providers, Gmail and Yahoo don’t recycle unused/deleted gmail/yahoo addresses ever (whereas other paid providers like Fastmail, Posteo, etc., do recycle within a few months or in a year or so). One needs to be wary of address recycling policies while using somebody else’s domain.
- paranoidrobot 5y ago
  This is talking about registering with example@gmail.com on ServiceX. Then you ask ServiceX to delete your account, and they instead change your email address to example-deleted@gmail.com or something like that. I doubt GMail are going to stop you registering accounts that have arbitrary portions of your email being another registered user.
  - AnonC 5y ago
    GP here. I understood that part on later reflection. Yes, any random name-deleted address could be registered by someone else. I’m unable to edit my previous comment now and correct it. Will add a note as a reply anyway.
- AnonC 5y ago
  I’m unable to edit my comment above, but I understood the problem of changing the email address (even to something like name-deleted, since it could be claimed or already registered by someone else). In this context, my comment above is pointless. :( Thanks also to @paranoidrobot for the additional explanation.

odonnellryan 5y ago

Is no one mentioning how you cannot delete your account on HN? :)

bombcar 5y ago
Account deletion is available on HN Gold over ipv6 only.
notRobot 5y ago
You can, you just have to email the mods.

ehnto 5y ago

I guess it can get complicated, but most of the software I've written I gracefully handle missing user relationships so that it's possible to delete the user. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of these circumstances are just because the software can't handle a missing user relationship, nothing nefarious. Stupidity before malice and all that.

jack335 5y ago

Thanks for that overview! I still don't get it how businesses even in these days can make it hard for you do delete your account.

dschuetz 5y ago

Is it possible in Germany to file a GDPR violation against vendors who outright refuse deletion or fail to comply otherwise?

Nextgrid 5y ago
It should be possible to complain to your local data protection authority. Whether they'll do anything tangible about it is another matter (in the UK the answer is absolutely not), and same for whether they are able to do anything tangible about it (good luck if the offender is shielded behind the crooked Irish DPA).
Allypost 5y ago
I'm pretty sure you can file a complaint with any company that operates in Germany (or other GDPR-supporting countries). AFAIK it does not matter where they're registered, only that they provide services in your country.
- dschuetz 5y ago
  I wonder if I can automate this...

swiftcoder 5y ago

> The last successful request was processed 71 days after the first email. The GDPR doesn’t define “without undue delay”, but I’m fairly certain that it requires companies to not stall for over 10 weeks. Having worked at a couple of cloud companies... the GDPR deletion timeline within our systems was 90 days. I assume that legal had vetted that timeline.

rav 5y ago

The post paints a discouraging picture overall, but it does have some interesting double standards if you consider these three separate quotes: > It would seem there is no end to how far businesses can take white-labeling and outsourcing. > I’m sure engineering time to manually delete data must be more expensive in the long run than creating processes and tools for customers and customer support representatives to handle delectation requests. > 11 of these were smaller niche online stores. If I'm a "niche online store", am I somehow excused from these rules? I would think there would be a market for white-labeled online stores for niche online stores, but that's somehow Bad™? But having an in-house engineering team develop the platform and respond to development needs as they arise (to handle the first account deletion request) is also Bad™?

theknocker 5y ago

av501 5y ago

It is a function of incentives and punishments. The nature of the company you are in and the risk the org is willing to bear plays out. I work for one that puts in a lot of effort to get rid of all the user data if they request a deletion based on the laws of the country they are from which we can expand to any user as needed. Whenever we have found gaps in our existing data storage, we go back and really try to clean it up. However there is a lot of legacy that surfaces out time to time. The reality is doing this is messy and is going to remain so for some time. One cannot suddenly start after years of no incentives in the online economy to do this and get to cover all areas without huge cost. This requires giving up competitive advantage today. Mid to small organisations that were beyond startup state but not yet having 1000's of engineers, which have to balance growth and operational aspects are left in the most difficult situation. As the laws started taking hold, their incentive structure is still not fully aligned with this as the digital economy does not yet reward them for this enough nor does enforcement create a large enough risk yet. Same thing plays out with some of the larger orgs, just that they have more lawyers to help them stall this as humans are always biased to keep the status quo if it is beneficial to them. Personally I think we've had a start but its going to take some time to get to where we need to be. I really applaud the idea of the privacy laws and the intent behind them. Its just that one has to recognise we won't be getting to a state of good behaviour within a few years after a couple of decades of not having those requirements baked in from the get go. Old habits have to be replaced as well. The enforcement is hard and that will be something that has to be bubbled upwards from the ground up by users themselves to create a digital economy where consumers/users reward those that respect their privacy. It is just not yet that way today, so why would the organisations change? The risk is low as enforcement is hard and the user demand is not enough. Most successful would be attempts by large organisations such as Apple and laws like GDPR which forces developers and companies to change their thinking. By asking for change and continuing to iterate on that you can start seeing a slow move towards development practices that will have privacy by default. You need the whole chain of actors to move towards this: The product managers, the engineering leads and architects, the decision makers, the risk assessors. Once enforcement is more steady alongside more demand from users the balance will come. All of this moves slowly whether we like it or not. (edit - grammar and made some long sentences shorted)

osener 5y ago

I wonder how this is supposed to work with workplace apps such as Slack, especially with regards to GDPR. Say I am leaving my job, and want my personal information to be purged from this 3rd party service (Slack). They say [1] "Primary Owners of a workspace or org must contact Slack to request deletion of a deactivated member's profile information.". What if I contact the "Primary Owner" before leaving my job and they ignore my request, or better yet I have already left my job and I don't know how to contact them or who they are? Why can't I request my personal information to be deleted from a completely 3rd party American company's database myself? [1] https://slack.com/help/articles/360000360443-Delete-profile-information-from-Slack https://slack.com/help/articles/360000360443-Delete-profile-...

aneeshnl 5y ago
If you are using company account, company owns the data. The data produced during company time is company's property. Company has to request for deletion. Slack is right about it.
- osener 5y ago
  This makes me ask more questions: - Is my full name, birth date, telephone number, job and other details Slack collects company property? - Can they also sell this to other 3rd parties along with my social security number which was also collected by the company during company time? - Is Slack also free to sell this data to other parties afterwards? - Does GDPR protect your personal information if you gave it away during your free / unemployed time using your personally owned devices and only to services you have admin access to?

xyst 5y ago

Had a similar terrible experience with crypto.com. After the MFA and stolen digital assets debacle earlier this year, decided to [hard/soft] delete my account with them. The company has a very complicated process for account deletions which involves having the account owner send a picture of themselves holding a sign. The picture must meet several criteria in order to be accepted. https://help.crypto.com/en/articles/3640569-how-to-close-crypto-com-account https://help.crypto.com/en/articles/3640569-how-to-close-cry... (note: as of today the link to their selfie requirements is dead) The entire process took 45 days to resolve because their e-mail support is fucking terrible.

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

My favorite in the bad old days was ETrade. They wanted money to delete your account - $80! Fortunately they had an 'ETrade checks' feature, so I wrote myself a check on my account for the entire total, directed their email to the trash and threw their snail-mail away for 2 years before it dried up.

throwaway22032 5y ago

Data once out is out. Period. Try telling a friend a sufficiently spicy secret and then tell me there's a delete. It's just as much a falsehood as imagining you can un-break a window.