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Internet spring cleaning: How to delete Instagram, Facebook and other accounts

554 points by Ashoka_rkt 4y ago

hnhg 4y ago
Worth mentioning redact.dev here too for deleting posts and behavioural content on various platforms.
- reustle 4y ago
  Clickable link: https://redact.dev https://redact.dev
qiskit 4y ago
Firefox's market share is what? 3%? Shouldn't mozilla be focusing more on that than this nonsense? So much unnecessary waste of capital in tech.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
agilob 4y ago
Edit, Link should be https://justdeleteme.xyz/ https://justdeleteme.xyz/
- bennyp101 4y ago
  I quickly checked a few of those that say "impossible" and they clearly are possible - kinda makes me think I'd be better off searching for "[service] delete account" and just doing that. (I did notice some said "subject to applicable law" - so I guess Europe!)
- hoppyhoppy2 4y ago
  I'm not sure why one would use this "backgroundchecks" redirection link, which just appears to add ads to the top of the page. The actual site is https://justdeleteme.xyz/ https://justdeleteme.xyz/
  - agilob 4y ago
    oh sorry, I posted it from mobile, didnt even notice it's wrong domain!
bennyp101 4y ago
I'd much rather they figured out how to fix their sync service - or at least let me actually delete everything on it and start again! I still get temporary containers coming back months after I have deleted them!
- replygirl 4y ago
  sir, i dont think their content editor can do anything about that.
- boondaburrah 4y ago
  firefox containers is both the killer feature of firefox for me (I can't leave it) and also the jankyest. I don't think mozilla knows they have gold on their hands (but do they ever know?). I lived through the firefox extension debacle in 2019 or so when FF accidentally let a cert expire and it helpfully uninstalled all my "unverified" extensions, of which container tabs was one. When everything was fixed, my settings were erased. Except they weren't. To this day, I still get random ghost-like behaviour from my old container tabs settings. Google-contained apps will try to open in my banking container, as I gradually realise all of my containers were deleted but the URL-to-container mapping wasn't, and it was by ID not name, and the IDs have been reused. Containers should be a core feature because they are /the/ feature ff has over the chrome army right now. I know they were (are?) trying to prove that core features aren't necessary because you can write anything in a web extension (IIRC that's how they justified getting rid of RSS), but it just hasn't been so in my experience.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    I suspect that Mozilla looks at the telemetry and very few people use containers. I'd guess because users don't understand what they're good for. Perhaps you, an enthusiastic user, could do a little writeup somewhere (here?) on why they are the cat's meow.
    - tg180 4y ago
      I agree, very few people are able to properly understand and manage containers. For mosts it should be easier and more intuitive to use Firefox with First Party Isolation enabled. The mental gymnastics of container management becomes superfluous, and there is minimal risk of leaking data by mistake.
jorvi 4y ago
I have an Instagram account that I no longer own the e-mail or recovery phone number for. I have the password for it but every time I try to log in I get a ‘suspicious login’ warning and have to verify with said phone number. I want it gone but I cannot delete it. Loathe as I am I would even be willing to provide government ID. Instagram literally has no contactable support if you aren’t a massive account (200k+ followers or whatever). I feel this should be highly illegal. I have thought about retaining a lawyer and see if I can twist their arm legally (via GDPR), but I don’t want a simple account deletion to run in the tens of thousands of euros. Yes I am intensely frustrated.
- prox 4y ago
  I feel the same way with the contact ability. Companies should have a human contact opportunity by law.
  - micromacrofoot 4y ago
    they’ll just make you wait an hour and hang up on you like my health insurance company does, unfortunately you can’t mandate good service
    - prox 4y ago
      Still I will take it above no possibility at all.
- adambyrtek 4y ago
  You don't need a lawyer to send a standard "right to erasure" GDPR request and they are required to respond within 30 days: https://gdpr.eu/right-to-erasure-request-form/ https://gdpr.eu/right-to-erasure-request-form/
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    This should work. The automated ID verification might fail for a variety of reasons (frankly if they don’t originally have a copy I’m not sure what they’d be comparing it to) but the GDPR process should work if you fight long enough. You might need to prove that you owned the email or number though - email might be tricky but number is easier as you can submit a bill or do another subject access request to your provider which should still have records about it. Good luck!
politician 4y ago
Venmo seems out of place. What about PayPal? Cash App?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  Does Venmo have a social aspect that the others lack?
  - politician 4y ago
    I don’t think so. It’s just a way to pay people with the ACH process handled in the background.
endisneigh 4y ago
Personally I think it’s a bad idea to delete any of your accounts. It becomes a huge hassle to claim anything if there’s a situation in which you need an account that can show that you have ownership. In particular if you see a photo of you or yours somewhere and want it modified or removed. Not to mention there’s really no value in deletion. Log out, stop using all of the clients. The end.
- mrtesthah 4y ago
  Isn’t this the use case for Keybase?
- kibwen 4y ago
  Whether or not you have an account with a service should not matter here. If your country doesn't grant you the legal right to get a photo taken down, then a service won't take it down even if you have an account. And if you do have the legal right do have a photo taken down, then the service will take it down even if you don't have an account, lest they become victim to a lawsuit that they will easily lose.
- sdevonoes 4y ago
  > Not to mention there’s really no value in deletion. Log out, stop using all of the clients. The end. I see value in deleting information about me on the Internet. Not to hide it from companies like Facebook (because they probably hold you data even if you delete them), but from other people. You never know who can use your pictures/profile for. Obviously, the first step would be to not publish sensitive information about yourself, but if that ship has already sailed, well, the least you can do is to remove it before you "log out and stop using all the clients".
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    You don’t need to delete your account to hide it. Deleting your account simply just stops your ability to prove who you are if you later find your stuff archived or mirrored somewhere. I don’t really see what you gain by deletion. Better off running one of many scripts to delete all your data and retain the account
BrianOnHN 4y ago
I've been looking for a similar solution for deleting Facebook, though one with a checklist of "don't forget these things you want to keep." Edit: I'd even pay >$100 just for a ZIP of "everything you might regret deleting." The connections are valueless at this point, but the pictures and my mom's priceless comments on them not so much.
- wonderbore 4y ago
  That’s literally the export feature that Facebook had for a decade, for free. I use it regularly because I heard that sometimes it “forgets” older messages though.
politelemon 4y ago
The 'How to delete Google' section seems out of place and somewhat forced. The reasoning behind suggesting cleaning/deleting becomes weaker or absent further down the page. I think the page could have done with a bit more focus, just highlight the important ones rather than looking for filler material?
- ape4 4y ago
  As a half way measure, you can ask it not to remember your history
trapatsas 4y ago
The article could just simple give some instructions on how to stop your data and internet subscriptions, which is pretty much equivalent.
Chernobog 4y ago
I communicate with a lot of people on Facebook, but I hated that I ended up scrolling my feed. So I unfollowed everything and now I have an empty feed and nothing to scroll. I realize many have reasons to get rid of Facebook entirely, but for me this was a reasonable compromise.
- derwiki 4y ago
  I’ve been using Beeper to use Facebook messages without using Facebook directly.
  - deergomoo 4y ago
    It’s also worth noting that you can continue to use Messenger with a de-activated Facebook profile.
  - astura 4y ago
    Messenger is a different app, you can install it without having the Facebook app installed.
  - dicknuckle 4y ago
    I've been using Disa.im but every few years FB breaks the API it uses for a few days or weeks at a time.
- footlose_3815 4y ago
  [dead]
- scottdupoy 4y ago
  I did exactly the same thing a few years ago - now it feels like a pull service that I'm in control of, instead of a push service with an algorithm controlling the content I view.
- philjohn 4y ago
  Same - and this is really the crux of the matter. You are in control of how toxic your social media experience is. Find that a group or particular person is making your world a worse place? Unfollow/Unfriend. People bemoan the Facebook of old where it was updates from friends old and new, and family - but that's still the core of the product, groups are optional.
romanovcode 4y ago
"Close" is not "Delete". Would be nice to have actual guides on deleting your data, for example for Spotify.
- btdmaster 4y ago
  https://justdeleteme.xyz https://justdeleteme.xyz: "Public playlists will be anonymised, delete any playlists you want."
amin 4y ago
I have friends and family, and groups in which I discuss highly specific topics. I don't think there's a better tool than Facebook that allows me to stay up to date on things that are important to me. The equivalent subreddits are of much worse quality. I know this will get downvotes, but this is my opinion.
- kibwen 4y ago
  Discord has taken over this role for me and all my social groups. And unlike Facebook there's no ads, no viral bullshit, no astroturfers, no personal information, and you can keep your identities separate across multiple social circles (all of which are private and invite-only by default).
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    > And unlike Facebook there's no ads, no viral bullshit, no astroturfers, no personal information The counter to all of this is "for now..." - there's no network that gets massive without falling prey to numerous kinds of incentives.
    - kibwen 4y ago
      Sure, but then we'll migrate somewhere else. "They'll be bad eventually" is by no means an argument in favor of instead using a service that is worse now.
  - mccorrinall 4y ago
    Facebook at least doesn’t force me to subscribe to a 5$ service in order to upload images from my phone. It’s so annoying that they can’t just compress images and videos on the client. Right now I’m always sharing videos and photos to telegram first, since their client actually compresses most of the files below 8MB and then continue sharing it to discord once again. The UX as a free discord user is horrible.
    - Pigalowda 4y ago
baby 4y ago
Please don’t do this. It’s really sad every time I want to reach out to an old friend and I can’t because they deleted their fb :( I mean, if you don’t have such connections then who cares, but if you do think about that
- jll29 4y ago
  Please use email instead, which is a standardized open protocol that does give people some choices. You can always exchange email addresses before closing down accounts to stay in touch.
  - baby 4y ago
    My generation doesn’t use emails basically. I changed emails quite a lot through my younger years as did my friends so it wouldn’t have been useful. We used to ask for people’s facebook shortly after meeting them. It’s the best tool to create and maintain your social graph. I understand that not everybody use it this way, and that’s fine, but if you do please think about that. It’s really heart breaking how I lost contact with old friends due to this
    - yummypaint 4y ago
      Locating and contacting old friends is entirely within your means in 2022. What is most striking to me as someone in my early thirties is how much learned helplessness is associated with these communication technologies that supposedly enhance our capabilities. Facebook makes it easy to curate the appearance of friendship, but meaningful relationships take time and effort in the real world to maintain. People have traded quantity for quality, and the true impetus for this transformation is that social graphs with more nodes are easier for facebook to make money from.
      - justapassenger 4y ago
        This enabled me reach out to an ”apparent” friend (someone I had very casual relationship with and didn’t talk to for 10 years) in 30 second. And that person helped my “true” friends evacuate from Ukraine and avoid being killed. Extended social networks are integral part of humanity and communities. Being isolated and interacting only with handful of true friends is more modern invention.
jll29 4y ago
Here's a sample letter for European citizens that would like to make a legally-binding data subject deletion request: https://www.datarequests.org/blog/sample-letter-gdpr-erasure-request/ https://www.datarequests.org/blog/sample-letter-gdpr-erasure... Send this letter by email and my registered snail mail letter to the Data Protection Officer of the company (e.g. Facebook's Dublin Office). Violating such a request can lead to fines of 4% of annual revenue of any offending company.
- xigoi 4y ago
  If a company violates 25 requests, does it lose all revenue?
- 3np 4y ago
  Nit: EU residents, not EU citizens. The reach of the law is concerned with where you are, not what your citizenship is.
dijit 4y ago
There was a really good service like 10 years ago that auto deleted Facebook/Instagram and so on. Sadly (and obviously) Facebook and co were extremely unhappy with such a service existing and took devastating steps to kill it. That said, it would be great to have some kind of service like that again. It shouldn’t be hard to erase a digital identity, that’s what GDPR stipulates anyway. More info on the service I’m referring to: https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/12/facebook-social-media-seppuku.html https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/12/facebook...
ahmedfromtunis 4y ago
To protect my mental wellbeing, I find that carefully selecting who to follow on some of these services improves considerably my experience. For Instagram and Twitter, my rule of thumb is to prefer topical accounts to entity ones. That is, accounts that are dedicated to a single topic, no matter how narrow or large the scope, over those of people and/or companies. Personal and business accounts, no matter how focused they are, tend to go off topic very often, and there's nothing to do about it. A designer or an art studio can still post about politics, religion, or whatever the controversy du jour is about. An account about logo design or some python framework, not so much if ever. This allows me to have a feed whose content I sort of control. With Twitter, it gets even better with lists, so I have ones about dev stuff, others about business topics, etc. and the content there is almost on topic most of the time. Since I started doing this, the impact of social media on my mood almost vanished, yet I'm still able to closely follow what's happening on topics I really care about. When I want to see what's happening on the real world, I check my Facebook. I'm sure aware of how bad these companies are with personal data. So it you think it'd be better to delete your account, then, yes, do it.
- nathias 4y ago
  Yea, I have followed a lot of philosophy professors and when COVID started the accounts started to behave like a botnet really aggressively retweeting anti-trump and covid mainstream media. I really don't know if that was actually a set of hacked accounts or if people really started to behave like locust. But just unfollowing people that just have opinions about 'current thing' will do a lot for the quality of your timeline.
- Mikeb85 4y ago
  > To protect my mental wellbeing, I find that carefully selecting who to follow on some of these services improves considerably my experience. For Instagram and Twitter, my rule of thumb This. These services aren't toxic if you don't follow toxic accounts. Also, I didn't think much about it in the past but now that I split my time between 3 countries and 2 continents, having FB (messenger) is the best way to keep in touch with people without bugging them with my several phone numbers (and charges that may occur, thanks Canadian telecoms).
searchableguy 4y ago
If you want to clean history regularly instead of deleting the account, you can use https://redact.dev https://redact.dev. I use it to clean twitter on regular interval. It works with every service except Google and Apple related ones (They can't add support for those without getting kicked off the app stores)
- philjohn 4y ago
  How do they get around only being able to get at your last 3000 tweets?
  - hallway_monitor 4y ago
    It seems like if you are tweeting that much you might not be someone who needs this service.
  - rovr138 4y ago
    If I have 6000, and it deletes 3000. Does it show the next 3000? No idea, just wondering if it's just batches of 3000 would solve that.
orsenthil 4y ago
Why is Mozilla publishing this?
- rvnx 4y ago
  Content-marketing / keyword stuffing, so when you search for "How to delete Instagram", you get on Mozilla website and get to learn about it and eventually decide to download Firefox, which will make money out of ads from Google Searches and other partnerships.
- pridkett 4y ago
  Mozilla is very active on privacy advocacy and highlights Firefox’s privacy as a feature[0]. This makes some sense because the features of Firefox (cookie blocking, containers, first class ad blocking) all help preserve your privacy better than Chrome or Edge. As part of this advocacy space they’ve also done things like “privacy not included”[1] (the asterisk and lowercase are intentional, similar to the 1987 movie “batteries not included”). [0]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/privacy/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/privacy/ [1]: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/about/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/about/
  - philjohn 4y ago
    Yes and no. Some of it seems genuine, but then you had the pocket debacle, as well as offering Google as the default search engine. They're all for privacy (which is a selling point) until there's money on the line. Much like Apple.
a_imho 4y ago
I'm not even convinced deleting (and especially deactivating) your account does anything besides handing over control to Facebook and others. Perhaps it is better to obfuscate the data in your account and just not log in, even if emotionally less appealing than deleting.
- dazc 4y ago
  No photo, some random DOB, location and obscure employement history for me. I used to advertise on FB so had to maintain an account purely for this purpose but noticed a few times that 'people you may know' were usually a result of random encounters looking me up. Maybe because only facebook can verify you're not a creep or something? One time I asked soemone out on a date and she seemed keen until the next day she had changed her mind. Probably pure coincidence that this person I didn't know until 2 days before was suddenly one of my 'people you may know' list. Sure enough my blank FB profile was the giveaway that I am actually a serial killer. Now I'd rather these people just go down a rabbit hole of looking through 1000 possible matches and finding nothing instead.
yamrzou 4y ago
I'm not sure deleting an Instagram account completely removes it from Facebook's servers. I recently deleted an old account, and after it was completely removed, I wanted to create a new one with the same username, but it complained that the username could not be used because it still "exists".
thenerdhead 4y ago
I've found myself between deleting, deactivating, and moderating my use of these apps for many years of my life. I never found deleting or deactivating to be very helpful. At some time or another you're going to need said account for something. While deleting is a bit extreme, some of these services will respect the actual deletion and others will not. I suppose the question at the end of the day is...why bother? I've found it much more easy to "declutter" by following digital minimalism practices of getting rid of apps, only using browsers, practicing mindfulness of said platforms, and only using said platforms with a specific intention. There's a laundry list of tips you could use to make social media harder to use or even more bearable, but the most effective approach I've used is simple moderation and mindfulness. Also why is Mozilla writing articles about this? I get the privacy angle, but aren't they also willing to put ads in front of people and other partnerships sacrificing that privacy for users? Like how does Mozilla make money outside of Google search engine being the default? I do know they lay off many of my friends who work on dev tools or even mobile apps there(i.e. browsers).
- toastercat 4y ago
  > At some time or another you're going to need said account for something. Nope for almost all of these. Different strokes different folks. > Facebook Nope. Haven't had one for more than 10 years now. So easy to live life without a FB account. I stay in touch with family and friends by phonecalls and Mumble. > Instagram Used it for maybe 10 minutes in 2013, haven't touched since. > Snapchat Same as Instagram, but in 2016. > Tiktok Same as above. > Spotify I listen to music on my harddrive. > Venmo Still using Paypal since 2012. > Twitter Nope, in fact my life has been significantly improved since I've not had an account. I use Nitter when I want to read a Twitter thread. Amazon and Google are the only ones that I find very hard to avoid, but Google has gotten increasingly easy to avoid as alternative services are popping up.
  - klabb3 4y ago
    > Venmo The fact that venmo is on this list is hilarious, but yes it is deserved. It's genuinely exciting to see where the limit of shameless growth hacking is, if there is any. Will there ever be a dialysis machine that invites all your friends?
ggga 4y ago
Gghjj
sunjester 4y ago
Anyone who reads the Mozilla Blog probably doesn't need this guide, so for whom is this article targeting?
- ouid 4y ago
  The hackernews comments section, populated by people who are looking to talk about their latest argument against social media (guilty), but who typically need to find an appropriate article for that rant to be on topic.
- tqi 4y ago
jiffygist 4y ago
I have an old facebook account registered using the email address that no longer exists so it is impossible for me to log into it. Yet it still exists and appears in google search results. I would've written to the support, but I can't find any way to contact facebook. Any suggestions?
crossroadsguy 4y ago
I deleted my Facebook account. Good decision. The username - my first name (very common in my country) - was then used by a guy who regularly posts sexist, religious hatred, general ultra right wing posts - he’s kinda high up in a state committee of the ruling party. I kinda feel bad about that. (Same guy got my Instagram handle as well - I think he was waiting for it) Then I had to open a Facebook account anyway, because house hunting here became next to impossible without it. So that’s there.
butz 4y ago
One thing to watch out for, is that on some platforms (those that are not doing correct email account ownership verification) account might get recreated either by accident or not, by a person using your email address. I think it is better just to remove as much personal data as possible, cleanup account and leave it with updated, more secure password.
- ddalex 4y ago
  If somebody creates an FB account with my email address, I will took it over immediately and remove it.
- 3np 4y ago
  Alternatively: Let them, even click the confirm link for them; increase the noise-to-signal ratio for their tracking, targeting, and profiling.
VLM 4y ago
Most people don't need to delete their accounts. I have a tasty bottle of rather expensive whiskey on the bar in my basement right now. Luxury consumables are a good gift, I guess. I don't want to drink it right now because I have things to do requiring sobriety, its a bit early in the day for that sort of thing, etc. I got my reasons, none of them terribly interesting. If I don't want to drink it for various reasons, I merely need to not drink it; for me this is very easy to do, not having an addiction. An alcoholic whom does not want to drink it, would absolutely need to perform the ritual of dumping it down the drain. Note that the ritualistic act of pouring alcohol down the drain does not cure alcoholism, it just wastes time and money. And it is just so with social media addicts periodically deleting their accounts. Usually comes alongside a long rationalization and projection about privacy and paranoia about sharing information.
- agency 4y ago
  What a bizarre take. You should continue to volunteer your personal information to an ad-tech behemoth… in order to prove you’re not an addict?
  - hunter2_ 4y ago
    The one little nugget I'm gleaning is that for people who are able, not even volunteering that you're incapable of simply ignoring the account is also worth considering. Like setting up an email filter instead of clicking unsubscribe on a mailing list, since doing so is yet another piece of information.
  - jamal-kumar 4y ago
    Yeah I'm pretty sure that the whiskey in the basement isn't spying on you It would be a truly messed up world if that was the case
    - VLM 4y ago
      > whiskey in the basement isn't spying on you Everyone important in the world already knows my SiL bought it for me, tracked at the point of sale using a loyalty card, tracked via her credit card, her highway pass shows she visited to deliver it to me on my birthday, it probably has a RFID chip somewhere either for theft protection or inventory tracking (maybe in the presentation box not the bottle itself "obviously"?). The bank has a record of what she bought which is probably legally or illegally shared with the health insurance company and/or medical care. Her fitbit tracked her walking thru the store. But, yeah, the "real" threat to my privacy is people on HN now know I have an expensive bottle of whiskey, LOL. Or my cat-meme sharing account on FB, if I used FB, would know that I have a nice bottle. Because that distractor is the "real threat" not everyone in the paragraph above whom I have zero control over. If an organization or whatever knows they're going to piss people off, give them a false sense of control. Maybe give them fake elections where both candidates are insiders. Maybe provide corporate oversight by a revolving door between the regulators and the regulated. Its all pretty standard propaganda stuff.
cube00 4y ago
> While the tech giant will likely continue to loom large over our lives, from search to email to our calendars, we can delete inactive or unnecessary Google accounts. This is a missed opportunity to recommend good alternatives, especially for email and getting people onto their own domains.
the__alchemist 4y ago
Thx; deleted Spotify. Ended up needing a conversation with their chat bot and email confirmation, but was over in 5 minutes.
hexo 4y ago
How to delete unwanted features from Firefox and bring back wanted ones would come handy as well.
jamal-kumar 4y ago
I left my home country and when I did this people thought I died or something hahaha. I got forwarded screenshots from all these worried people wondering where the fuck I went. Some of them thought I blocked them or something Like no, I just got incredibly sick of being exposed to that level of banality
OtomotO 4y ago
I don't have accounts on any of these platforms. But when I follow people (where possible, e.g. twitter) I only follow people that are interesting or have a completely different worldview than me. I don't want to live in a bubble and I don't need to hear my own opinion, I know it anyway.
ge96 4y ago
I was in high school when FB came out, and man I got sucked into it, posting cringe things everyday. I was lucky I caught myself later on/stopped. Also means I didn't get sucked into TikTok (never used it). I still partake in social media though just accounts not tied to my name. I want to delete my FB account but it has all of my old pictures/videos from childhood. I closed it for now, made another one just for family. The main reason I abandoned my main FB account is too many people that were asking me for money found me and I stupidly accepted their friend requests. I spend most of my time alone though so social media still has a place for me.
97s 4y ago
Deleted all of these years ago besides Google for email. Never looked back, one of the best decisions I have ever made.
yololol 4y ago
It really gets me that Mozilla has adopted this political / activist marketing style. It feels so fake.
- Barrin92 4y ago
  Mozilla, as in the foundation, is broader than the browser and that blog has been running since 2007 with plenty of privacy focused content on it. The point of Mozilla has always been to advocate for an open internet rather than a corporate one, so I don't see the change in objective here. Firefox is one means to that end. Not sure why "marketing", "political" or "activist" are supposed to be negatives.
  - pelasaco 4y ago
    the part "Whether you want to follow in Neil Young’s footsteps or are already streaming music and podcasts through another service, deleting your stagnant Spotify account is a good idea." has nothing to do with privacy, but with an specific agenda.
    - Barrin92 4y ago
      of course they have a specific agenda, it's on their website (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/) I'm slightly out of the loop on the Neil Young stuff but I assume this is about Rogan spreading antivax content or something, which I don't think is very compatible with Mozilla pushing for an internet that is civil, free of misinformation and factual, so it seems to me they're sticking to their principles, which I think are very reasonable.
      - pelasaco 4y ago
        interesting that I see they actually going against their own manifesto, specially the points: - "We are committed to an internet that promotes civil discourse, human dignity, and individual expression." - "We are committed to an internet that elevates critical thinking, reasoned argument, shared knowledge, and verifiable facts." For sure one can paint what Rogan does as "spreading antivax content or something" but that is not what he does.
blackearl 4y ago
How do you delete facebook if you're at the stage where they've requested you upload a photo ID, passport, SSN, lock of hair, and stool sample just to sign in?
throwawayhnacct 4y ago
How to I delete my HN account?? (not this throwaway account, but my real one)
- zgk7iqea 4y ago
  https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-unofficial-hn-faq/#deleteaccount https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-unofficial-hn-faq/#deleteacc... You can't.
shashashasha___ 4y ago
missing how to delete your Mozilla account?
Ashoka_rkt 4y ago
Though I haven't deleted my social media accounts, I don't use them at all even on an occasional basis. I have them for reaching out to my acquaintances/old friends, access content behind login(when I've been shared with their links), etc. After watching The Social Dilemma(1), I've grown even more averse towards social media. Many regular social media consumers feel that they get useful info out of it along with their entertainment content. Consider this, there are specific sources to get entertainment-netflix,local newspaper website's movie/gossip section,etc. And if one is looking for useful info, the chance of finding the info that is really useful/timely in the specific moment of their life is more via a web search than their infinite feed in their Facebook/twitter/instagram. If you really need an info then you wouldn't rely on random chance/luck that's needed in finding that in your feed. Here in India, WhatsApp is ubiquitous, it is kind of used as a work chat as well when people are logged out of work MSTeams/Skype. So I have WhatsApp installed but I don't go to it to browse the status messages/pics people post, no matter how tempting it is :). I use other more privacy friendly apps for messaging with family and friends. It is hard to tell people to stop using social media, sometimes people find it offending/intrusive. But the perspective of life changes if you don't use social media. You seem to have time for more things in life. We also have to admit that many don't have the luxury(work/professional reasons) to avoid social media altogether. 1- http://thesocialdilemma.com http://thesocialdilemma.com
aendruk 4y ago
The missing follow-up is how to stay in the loop with your friends and family who continue to use these services. Many used to be actively helpful by serving web feeds of public content. Now, not only have they removed the feeds, but they actively sabotage their public website to pressure you back into their control.
davidkuennen 4y ago
Instead of deleting, I usually simply deactivate all notifications by default. I think only 1 or 2 apps are allowed so send notifications and one of them is my own.
notjustanymike 4y ago
Delete. Delete delete delete. Did it a few years back, trust me you won't miss out on anything important. In fact, the opposite: important things will find a way to you regardless. It's the unimportant things that will filter out.
csnti 4y ago
The only reason why I haven't deleted FB is because of the memories shared on there. I haven't posted on my timeline in years. A long time ago, I got spooked when I saw ads that tracked my Google search activity, that's what drove me away from social media in general; an utter lack of respect for the privacy of users. And then I got obsessed with finding out ways to avoid fingerprinting (it's nearly impossible). On the odd occasion I might log-in to see what people are up to, but for the most part I keep in touch with friends and family through text and sometimes Discord. I deleted my linkedin because I kept getting nothing but spam emails, with no actual prospects of a job. Tbh I think that entire platform is a cesspool.
- jancsika 4y ago
  > And then I got obsessed with finding out ways to avoid fingerprinting (it's nearly impossible). At that point it's worth considering heading to a university library and reading the periodicals and books that are housed there. Obsession = 3+ hours a day attempting to defeat tracking in a category of software designed to track you. I live about 40 minutes away from a decent university library. In your first six days of failing to avoid fingerprinting, I would have gotten nine hours of private, uninterrupted reading time. Even better-- if I chose to read a newspaper in the library, I wouldn't be distracted by a cheapo "companion scroll" taped to the bottom by Silicon Valley types so their underlings can paste "Gellman-Amnesia effect ftw" during breaks in some desperate attempt to misdirect the angst that must come from polishing someone else's ad tech for a living.
enahs-sf 4y ago
Startup idea: wipe yourself from the internet completely as a service.
pipeline_peak 4y ago
Mozilla is sounding less like a browser developer and more like Richard Stallman.
- mikojan 4y ago
  Good.
wheelerof4te 4y ago
People will always find ways to waste their time. The least you can do is to do it of your own will instead of being pushed into it by conditioning from various social networks.
webchat 4y ago
[dead]
russellbeattie 4y ago
Don't delete the accounts, delete the data in the accounts. That way you can keep your usernames and logins for various services. In 2016 I deleted all the tweets I had made over the previous 9 years, and soon after I backed up then cleaned out my FB profile and unfollowed all my contacts. There was a lot of manual labor involved in this because I had auto imported a bunch of stuff early in FBs life, and it was all sort of stuck in there. FBs crappy API and barely functioning admin UI made it slow going, but it was worth it. As soon as Instagram shows any sign of its popularity waning with my contacts, I'll be deleting all the pics there as well.
tbrockman 4y ago
It’s pretty interesting to see so many people here suggesting that there’s no value to deleting your account. Like the added friction of creating a new account doesn’t make it less likely for you to relapse, or increase the time it takes for it to happen. Like social media applications won’t send you notifications however they can to keep you engaged. Like it doesn’t affect the companies perceived value to lose real users. Like it doesn’t diminish network effects to see fewer of the people you like on the platform. Like retaining the data you’ve contributed doesn’t increase the performance of their machine learning models, broaden their understanding of consumers, or directly provide content for consumption. (okay this point is a bit shaky because it depends on their data deletion policy, or if you can take advantage of CCPA/GDPR, but you get the idea) I agree that leaving or maintaining healthy use of these platforms ultimately requires developing some amount of self-control, but saying that there’s no value to deleting an account doesn’t seem grounded in truth. I found it way easier to just delete the majority of my social media accounts than try to curate or moderate their use. Most social media platforms aren’t built with your best interests at heart, why risk it for some momentarily satisfying content/interactions that you could probably find elsewhere?
LB232323 4y ago
People are realizing that social media is draining, predatory, and entirely superfluous. Of course there are employees here of social media corporations who would want to stem the tide of this mass exodus, but it's useless. Social media corporations have overstepped their boundaries and become a net negative on human society. Deleting your social media accounts results in an immediate improvement of quality of life and mental wellbeing. These sites are intentionally designed with predatory psychological mechanisms, they are designed by hackers like ourselves, but the hackers who see "social engineering" as a perfectly ethical practice and not simply psychological manipulation. These services are designed to be addictive, full stop. Addiction is not healthy, and neither is social media. Maybe this will bring SV back to its roots, real technological progress for the nation and not desperate bids for data mining based on cheap psychological tricks. People are growing sickened of the endless scrolls of psychological disturbing viral content combined with the false positivity of human interest stories. It is deepening social divisions, racial conflicts, political partisanship, and general misery. We don't need social media, what we need is real social connections in an increasingly isolated society, and social media stands in the way of this.
- elvis10ten 4y ago
  I think social media is just serving people what they want. We can argue if this is a good thing or not. > Addiction is not healthy, and neither is social media. Maybe I’m an old head, but maybe we need more self discipline in the world? I know this is not pragmatic but I feel there are lots of things that are addictive (even things that were not designed to be). > We don't need social media, what we need is real social connections Maybe I’m using social media differently, but what is in today's social media that makes it mutually exclusive to real social connections?
  - patrick451 4y ago
    Meth labs are also giving people what they. Even if your take the full libertarian stance that all drugs should be legal, the parent comment did not seem to be advocating for outlawing social media. It was positing that people have realized that social media is an addictive toxin and are deciding, on their own, to bail out. If something is truly addictive, suggesting people develop some self discipline and partake just little seems misguided at best. It's way easier to just abstain completely. Nobody wants to end up like Doug Stamper dispensing three drops of whiskey from syringe onto their tongue.
Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
I deleted my Facebook account around 2017, then went back under a pseudonym (telling all my friends of this account of course), and then just recreating my old account again. Skip forward five years, I barely login to Facebook at all, even just to check up on friends.
trevorboaconstr 4y ago
One day I asked myself, after I use Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/other social media, how do I feel? The immediate answer was “not good.” Immediately deleted. This was 5 years ago. Not one day have I missed them. Have a LinkedIn in for professional connections. Anyone that I see/communicate with regularly I just text.
stereoradonc 4y ago
Last checked, it was a browser company. It's morphing into an internet agony aunt. Et Tu, Mozilla
Rebelgecko 4y ago
How do I delete my pocket account?
anotherevan 4y ago
> spring cleaning Hope they post this again in six months time for those of us in the southern hemisphere to be able to take advantage of it. :-^
MetroWind 4y ago
Personally I don't see the value in deleting accounts. I just don't use a service if I don't want to. I have not used Facebook for many many many years. It doesn't matter if my account is active or not. Why do I care? If my account is alive, they have to let it take up some of their storage, sucks for them. Twitter has been my main source of news. For the news I care about it has been more reliable than main stream media. But I do understand why some people want to stopping using it. Google is really hard because of YouTube, which is my main source of passive entertainment. Venmo is surprising to me---how do people use Venmo? Are they using it as social network somehow? I just open it when I need to pay someone, and close it when I finish, like using a wallet. Why are people bothered by it?

554 points by Ashoka_rkt 4y ago

hnhg 4y ago

Worth mentioning redact.dev here too for deleting posts and behavioural content on various platforms.

reustle 4y ago
Clickable link: https://redact.dev https://redact.dev

qiskit 4y ago

Firefox's market share is what? 3%? Shouldn't mozilla be focusing more on that than this nonsense? So much unnecessary waste of capital in tech.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

agilob 4y ago

Edit, Link should be https://justdeleteme.xyz/ https://justdeleteme.xyz/

bennyp101 4y ago
I quickly checked a few of those that say "impossible" and they clearly are possible - kinda makes me think I'd be better off searching for "[service] delete account" and just doing that. (I did notice some said "subject to applicable law" - so I guess Europe!)
hoppyhoppy2 4y ago
I'm not sure why one would use this "backgroundchecks" redirection link, which just appears to add ads to the top of the page. The actual site is https://justdeleteme.xyz/ https://justdeleteme.xyz/
- agilob 4y ago
  oh sorry, I posted it from mobile, didnt even notice it's wrong domain!

bennyp101 4y ago

I'd much rather they figured out how to fix their sync service - or at least let me actually delete everything on it and start again! I still get temporary containers coming back months after I have deleted them!

replygirl 4y ago
sir, i dont think their content editor can do anything about that.
boondaburrah 4y ago
firefox containers is both the killer feature of firefox for me (I can't leave it) and also the jankyest. I don't think mozilla knows they have gold on their hands (but do they ever know?). I lived through the firefox extension debacle in 2019 or so when FF accidentally let a cert expire and it helpfully uninstalled all my "unverified" extensions, of which container tabs was one. When everything was fixed, my settings were erased. Except they weren't. To this day, I still get random ghost-like behaviour from my old container tabs settings. Google-contained apps will try to open in my banking container, as I gradually realise all of my containers were deleted but the URL-to-container mapping wasn't, and it was by ID not name, and the IDs have been reused. Containers should be a core feature because they are /the/ feature ff has over the chrome army right now. I know they were (are?) trying to prove that core features aren't necessary because you can write anything in a web extension (IIRC that's how they justified getting rid of RSS), but it just hasn't been so in my experience.
- javajosh 4y ago
  I suspect that Mozilla looks at the telemetry and very few people use containers. I'd guess because users don't understand what they're good for. Perhaps you, an enthusiastic user, could do a little writeup somewhere (here?) on why they are the cat's meow.
  - tg180 4y ago
    I agree, very few people are able to properly understand and manage containers. For mosts it should be easier and more intuitive to use Firefox with First Party Isolation enabled. The mental gymnastics of container management becomes superfluous, and there is minimal risk of leaking data by mistake.

jorvi 4y ago

I have an Instagram account that I no longer own the e-mail or recovery phone number for. I have the password for it but every time I try to log in I get a ‘suspicious login’ warning and have to verify with said phone number. I want it gone but I cannot delete it. Loathe as I am I would even be willing to provide government ID. Instagram literally has no contactable support if you aren’t a massive account (200k+ followers or whatever). I feel this should be highly illegal. I have thought about retaining a lawyer and see if I can twist their arm legally (via GDPR), but I don’t want a simple account deletion to run in the tens of thousands of euros. Yes I am intensely frustrated.

prox 4y ago
I feel the same way with the contact ability. Companies should have a human contact opportunity by law.
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  they’ll just make you wait an hour and hang up on you like my health insurance company does, unfortunately you can’t mandate good service
  - prox 4y ago
    Still I will take it above no possibility at all.
adambyrtek 4y ago
You don't need a lawyer to send a standard "right to erasure" GDPR request and they are required to respond within 30 days: https://gdpr.eu/right-to-erasure-request-form/ https://gdpr.eu/right-to-erasure-request-form/
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  This should work. The automated ID verification might fail for a variety of reasons (frankly if they don’t originally have a copy I’m not sure what they’d be comparing it to) but the GDPR process should work if you fight long enough. You might need to prove that you owned the email or number though - email might be tricky but number is easier as you can submit a bill or do another subject access request to your provider which should still have records about it. Good luck!

politician 4y ago

Venmo seems out of place. What about PayPal? Cash App?

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Does Venmo have a social aspect that the others lack?
- politician 4y ago
  I don’t think so. It’s just a way to pay people with the ACH process handled in the background.

endisneigh 4y ago

Personally I think it’s a bad idea to delete any of your accounts. It becomes a huge hassle to claim anything if there’s a situation in which you need an account that can show that you have ownership. In particular if you see a photo of you or yours somewhere and want it modified or removed. Not to mention there’s really no value in deletion. Log out, stop using all of the clients. The end.

mrtesthah 4y ago
Isn’t this the use case for Keybase?
kibwen 4y ago
Whether or not you have an account with a service should not matter here. If your country doesn't grant you the legal right to get a photo taken down, then a service won't take it down even if you have an account. And if you do have the legal right do have a photo taken down, then the service will take it down even if you don't have an account, lest they become victim to a lawsuit that they will easily lose.
sdevonoes 4y ago
> Not to mention there’s really no value in deletion. Log out, stop using all of the clients. The end. I see value in deleting information about me on the Internet. Not to hide it from companies like Facebook (because they probably hold you data even if you delete them), but from other people. You never know who can use your pictures/profile for. Obviously, the first step would be to not publish sensitive information about yourself, but if that ship has already sailed, well, the least you can do is to remove it before you "log out and stop using all the clients".
- endisneigh 4y ago
  You don’t need to delete your account to hide it. Deleting your account simply just stops your ability to prove who you are if you later find your stuff archived or mirrored somewhere. I don’t really see what you gain by deletion. Better off running one of many scripts to delete all your data and retain the account

BrianOnHN 4y ago

I've been looking for a similar solution for deleting Facebook, though one with a checklist of "don't forget these things you want to keep." Edit: I'd even pay >$100 just for a ZIP of "everything you might regret deleting." The connections are valueless at this point, but the pictures and my mom's priceless comments on them not so much.

wonderbore 4y ago
That’s literally the export feature that Facebook had for a decade, for free. I use it regularly because I heard that sometimes it “forgets” older messages though.

politelemon 4y ago

The 'How to delete Google' section seems out of place and somewhat forced. The reasoning behind suggesting cleaning/deleting becomes weaker or absent further down the page. I think the page could have done with a bit more focus, just highlight the important ones rather than looking for filler material?

ape4 4y ago
As a half way measure, you can ask it not to remember your history

trapatsas 4y ago

The article could just simple give some instructions on how to stop your data and internet subscriptions, which is pretty much equivalent.

Chernobog 4y ago

I communicate with a lot of people on Facebook, but I hated that I ended up scrolling my feed. So I unfollowed everything and now I have an empty feed and nothing to scroll. I realize many have reasons to get rid of Facebook entirely, but for me this was a reasonable compromise.

derwiki 4y ago
I’ve been using Beeper to use Facebook messages without using Facebook directly.
- deergomoo 4y ago
  It’s also worth noting that you can continue to use Messenger with a de-activated Facebook profile.
- astura 4y ago
  Messenger is a different app, you can install it without having the Facebook app installed.
- dicknuckle 4y ago
  I've been using Disa.im but every few years FB breaks the API it uses for a few days or weeks at a time.
footlose_3815 4y ago
[dead]
scottdupoy 4y ago
I did exactly the same thing a few years ago - now it feels like a pull service that I'm in control of, instead of a push service with an algorithm controlling the content I view.
philjohn 4y ago
Same - and this is really the crux of the matter. You are in control of how toxic your social media experience is. Find that a group or particular person is making your world a worse place? Unfollow/Unfriend. People bemoan the Facebook of old where it was updates from friends old and new, and family - but that's still the core of the product, groups are optional.

romanovcode 4y ago

"Close" is not "Delete". Would be nice to have actual guides on deleting your data, for example for Spotify.

btdmaster 4y ago
https://justdeleteme.xyz https://justdeleteme.xyz: "Public playlists will be anonymised, delete any playlists you want."

amin 4y ago

I have friends and family, and groups in which I discuss highly specific topics. I don't think there's a better tool than Facebook that allows me to stay up to date on things that are important to me. The equivalent subreddits are of much worse quality. I know this will get downvotes, but this is my opinion.

kibwen 4y ago
Discord has taken over this role for me and all my social groups. And unlike Facebook there's no ads, no viral bullshit, no astroturfers, no personal information, and you can keep your identities separate across multiple social circles (all of which are private and invite-only by default).
- ekianjo 4y ago
  > And unlike Facebook there's no ads, no viral bullshit, no astroturfers, no personal information The counter to all of this is "for now..." - there's no network that gets massive without falling prey to numerous kinds of incentives.
  - kibwen 4y ago
    Sure, but then we'll migrate somewhere else. "They'll be bad eventually" is by no means an argument in favor of instead using a service that is worse now.
- mccorrinall 4y ago
  Facebook at least doesn’t force me to subscribe to a 5$ service in order to upload images from my phone. It’s so annoying that they can’t just compress images and videos on the client. Right now I’m always sharing videos and photos to telegram first, since their client actually compresses most of the files below 8MB and then continue sharing it to discord once again. The UX as a free discord user is horrible.
  - Pigalowda 4y ago

baby 4y ago

Please don’t do this. It’s really sad every time I want to reach out to an old friend and I can’t because they deleted their fb :( I mean, if you don’t have such connections then who cares, but if you do think about that

jll29 4y ago
Please use email instead, which is a standardized open protocol that does give people some choices. You can always exchange email addresses before closing down accounts to stay in touch.
- baby 4y ago
  My generation doesn’t use emails basically. I changed emails quite a lot through my younger years as did my friends so it wouldn’t have been useful. We used to ask for people’s facebook shortly after meeting them. It’s the best tool to create and maintain your social graph. I understand that not everybody use it this way, and that’s fine, but if you do please think about that. It’s really heart breaking how I lost contact with old friends due to this
  - yummypaint 4y ago
    Locating and contacting old friends is entirely within your means in 2022. What is most striking to me as someone in my early thirties is how much learned helplessness is associated with these communication technologies that supposedly enhance our capabilities. Facebook makes it easy to curate the appearance of friendship, but meaningful relationships take time and effort in the real world to maintain. People have traded quantity for quality, and the true impetus for this transformation is that social graphs with more nodes are easier for facebook to make money from.
    - justapassenger 4y ago
      This enabled me reach out to an ”apparent” friend (someone I had very casual relationship with and didn’t talk to for 10 years) in 30 second. And that person helped my “true” friends evacuate from Ukraine and avoid being killed. Extended social networks are integral part of humanity and communities. Being isolated and interacting only with handful of true friends is more modern invention.

jll29 4y ago

Here's a sample letter for European citizens that would like to make a legally-binding data subject deletion request: https://www.datarequests.org/blog/sample-letter-gdpr-erasure-request/ https://www.datarequests.org/blog/sample-letter-gdpr-erasure... Send this letter by email and my registered snail mail letter to the Data Protection Officer of the company (e.g. Facebook's Dublin Office). Violating such a request can lead to fines of 4% of annual revenue of any offending company.

xigoi 4y ago
If a company violates 25 requests, does it lose all revenue?
3np 4y ago
Nit: EU residents, not EU citizens. The reach of the law is concerned with where you are, not what your citizenship is.

dijit 4y ago

There was a really good service like 10 years ago that auto deleted Facebook/Instagram and so on. Sadly (and obviously) Facebook and co were extremely unhappy with such a service existing and took devastating steps to kill it. That said, it would be great to have some kind of service like that again. It shouldn’t be hard to erase a digital identity, that’s what GDPR stipulates anyway. More info on the service I’m referring to: https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/12/facebook-social-media-seppuku.html https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/12/facebook...

ahmedfromtunis 4y ago

To protect my mental wellbeing, I find that carefully selecting who to follow on some of these services improves considerably my experience. For Instagram and Twitter, my rule of thumb is to prefer topical accounts to entity ones. That is, accounts that are dedicated to a single topic, no matter how narrow or large the scope, over those of people and/or companies. Personal and business accounts, no matter how focused they are, tend to go off topic very often, and there's nothing to do about it. A designer or an art studio can still post about politics, religion, or whatever the controversy du jour is about. An account about logo design or some python framework, not so much if ever. This allows me to have a feed whose content I sort of control. With Twitter, it gets even better with lists, so I have ones about dev stuff, others about business topics, etc. and the content there is almost on topic most of the time. Since I started doing this, the impact of social media on my mood almost vanished, yet I'm still able to closely follow what's happening on topics I really care about. When I want to see what's happening on the real world, I check my Facebook. I'm sure aware of how bad these companies are with personal data. So it you think it'd be better to delete your account, then, yes, do it.

nathias 4y ago
Yea, I have followed a lot of philosophy professors and when COVID started the accounts started to behave like a botnet really aggressively retweeting anti-trump and covid mainstream media. I really don't know if that was actually a set of hacked accounts or if people really started to behave like locust. But just unfollowing people that just have opinions about 'current thing' will do a lot for the quality of your timeline.
Mikeb85 4y ago
> To protect my mental wellbeing, I find that carefully selecting who to follow on some of these services improves considerably my experience. For Instagram and Twitter, my rule of thumb This. These services aren't toxic if you don't follow toxic accounts. Also, I didn't think much about it in the past but now that I split my time between 3 countries and 2 continents, having FB (messenger) is the best way to keep in touch with people without bugging them with my several phone numbers (and charges that may occur, thanks Canadian telecoms).

searchableguy 4y ago

If you want to clean history regularly instead of deleting the account, you can use https://redact.dev https://redact.dev. I use it to clean twitter on regular interval. It works with every service except Google and Apple related ones (They can't add support for those without getting kicked off the app stores)

philjohn 4y ago
How do they get around only being able to get at your last 3000 tweets?
- hallway_monitor 4y ago
  It seems like if you are tweeting that much you might not be someone who needs this service.
- rovr138 4y ago
  If I have 6000, and it deletes 3000. Does it show the next 3000? No idea, just wondering if it's just batches of 3000 would solve that.

orsenthil 4y ago

Why is Mozilla publishing this?

rvnx 4y ago
Content-marketing / keyword stuffing, so when you search for "How to delete Instagram", you get on Mozilla website and get to learn about it and eventually decide to download Firefox, which will make money out of ads from Google Searches and other partnerships.
pridkett 4y ago
Mozilla is very active on privacy advocacy and highlights Firefox’s privacy as a feature[0]. This makes some sense because the features of Firefox (cookie blocking, containers, first class ad blocking) all help preserve your privacy better than Chrome or Edge. As part of this advocacy space they’ve also done things like “privacy not included”[1] (the asterisk and lowercase are intentional, similar to the 1987 movie “batteries not included”). [0]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/privacy/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/privacy/ [1]: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/about/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/about/
- philjohn 4y ago
  Yes and no. Some of it seems genuine, but then you had the pocket debacle, as well as offering Google as the default search engine. They're all for privacy (which is a selling point) until there's money on the line. Much like Apple.

a_imho 4y ago

I'm not even convinced deleting (and especially deactivating) your account does anything besides handing over control to Facebook and others. Perhaps it is better to obfuscate the data in your account and just not log in, even if emotionally less appealing than deleting.

dazc 4y ago
No photo, some random DOB, location and obscure employement history for me. I used to advertise on FB so had to maintain an account purely for this purpose but noticed a few times that 'people you may know' were usually a result of random encounters looking me up. Maybe because only facebook can verify you're not a creep or something? One time I asked soemone out on a date and she seemed keen until the next day she had changed her mind. Probably pure coincidence that this person I didn't know until 2 days before was suddenly one of my 'people you may know' list. Sure enough my blank FB profile was the giveaway that I am actually a serial killer. Now I'd rather these people just go down a rabbit hole of looking through 1000 possible matches and finding nothing instead.

yamrzou 4y ago

I'm not sure deleting an Instagram account completely removes it from Facebook's servers. I recently deleted an old account, and after it was completely removed, I wanted to create a new one with the same username, but it complained that the username could not be used because it still "exists".

thenerdhead 4y ago

I've found myself between deleting, deactivating, and moderating my use of these apps for many years of my life. I never found deleting or deactivating to be very helpful. At some time or another you're going to need said account for something. While deleting is a bit extreme, some of these services will respect the actual deletion and others will not. I suppose the question at the end of the day is...why bother? I've found it much more easy to "declutter" by following digital minimalism practices of getting rid of apps, only using browsers, practicing mindfulness of said platforms, and only using said platforms with a specific intention. There's a laundry list of tips you could use to make social media harder to use or even more bearable, but the most effective approach I've used is simple moderation and mindfulness. Also why is Mozilla writing articles about this? I get the privacy angle, but aren't they also willing to put ads in front of people and other partnerships sacrificing that privacy for users? Like how does Mozilla make money outside of Google search engine being the default? I do know they lay off many of my friends who work on dev tools or even mobile apps there(i.e. browsers).

toastercat 4y ago
> At some time or another you're going to need said account for something. Nope for almost all of these. Different strokes different folks. > Facebook Nope. Haven't had one for more than 10 years now. So easy to live life without a FB account. I stay in touch with family and friends by phonecalls and Mumble. > Instagram Used it for maybe 10 minutes in 2013, haven't touched since. > Snapchat Same as Instagram, but in 2016. > Tiktok Same as above. > Spotify I listen to music on my harddrive. > Venmo Still using Paypal since 2012. > Twitter Nope, in fact my life has been significantly improved since I've not had an account. I use Nitter when I want to read a Twitter thread. Amazon and Google are the only ones that I find very hard to avoid, but Google has gotten increasingly easy to avoid as alternative services are popping up.
- klabb3 4y ago
  > Venmo The fact that venmo is on this list is hilarious, but yes it is deserved. It's genuinely exciting to see where the limit of shameless growth hacking is, if there is any. Will there ever be a dialysis machine that invites all your friends?

ggga 4y ago

Gghjj

sunjester 4y ago

Anyone who reads the Mozilla Blog probably doesn't need this guide, so for whom is this article targeting?

ouid 4y ago
The hackernews comments section, populated by people who are looking to talk about their latest argument against social media (guilty), but who typically need to find an appropriate article for that rant to be on topic.
tqi 4y ago

jiffygist 4y ago

I have an old facebook account registered using the email address that no longer exists so it is impossible for me to log into it. Yet it still exists and appears in google search results. I would've written to the support, but I can't find any way to contact facebook. Any suggestions?

crossroadsguy 4y ago

I deleted my Facebook account. Good decision. The username - my first name (very common in my country) - was then used by a guy who regularly posts sexist, religious hatred, general ultra right wing posts - he’s kinda high up in a state committee of the ruling party. I kinda feel bad about that. (Same guy got my Instagram handle as well - I think he was waiting for it) Then I had to open a Facebook account anyway, because house hunting here became next to impossible without it. So that’s there.

butz 4y ago

One thing to watch out for, is that on some platforms (those that are not doing correct email account ownership verification) account might get recreated either by accident or not, by a person using your email address. I think it is better just to remove as much personal data as possible, cleanup account and leave it with updated, more secure password.

ddalex 4y ago
If somebody creates an FB account with my email address, I will took it over immediately and remove it.
3np 4y ago
Alternatively: Let them, even click the confirm link for them; increase the noise-to-signal ratio for their tracking, targeting, and profiling.

VLM 4y ago

Most people don't need to delete their accounts. I have a tasty bottle of rather expensive whiskey on the bar in my basement right now. Luxury consumables are a good gift, I guess. I don't want to drink it right now because I have things to do requiring sobriety, its a bit early in the day for that sort of thing, etc. I got my reasons, none of them terribly interesting. If I don't want to drink it for various reasons, I merely need to not drink it; for me this is very easy to do, not having an addiction. An alcoholic whom does not want to drink it, would absolutely need to perform the ritual of dumping it down the drain. Note that the ritualistic act of pouring alcohol down the drain does not cure alcoholism, it just wastes time and money. And it is just so with social media addicts periodically deleting their accounts. Usually comes alongside a long rationalization and projection about privacy and paranoia about sharing information.

agency 4y ago
What a bizarre take. You should continue to volunteer your personal information to an ad-tech behemoth… in order to prove you’re not an addict?
- hunter2_ 4y ago
  The one little nugget I'm gleaning is that for people who are able, not even volunteering that you're incapable of simply ignoring the account is also worth considering. Like setting up an email filter instead of clicking unsubscribe on a mailing list, since doing so is yet another piece of information.
- jamal-kumar 4y ago
  Yeah I'm pretty sure that the whiskey in the basement isn't spying on you It would be a truly messed up world if that was the case
  - VLM 4y ago
    > whiskey in the basement isn't spying on you Everyone important in the world already knows my SiL bought it for me, tracked at the point of sale using a loyalty card, tracked via her credit card, her highway pass shows she visited to deliver it to me on my birthday, it probably has a RFID chip somewhere either for theft protection or inventory tracking (maybe in the presentation box not the bottle itself "obviously"?). The bank has a record of what she bought which is probably legally or illegally shared with the health insurance company and/or medical care. Her fitbit tracked her walking thru the store. But, yeah, the "real" threat to my privacy is people on HN now know I have an expensive bottle of whiskey, LOL. Or my cat-meme sharing account on FB, if I used FB, would know that I have a nice bottle. Because that distractor is the "real threat" not everyone in the paragraph above whom I have zero control over. If an organization or whatever knows they're going to piss people off, give them a false sense of control. Maybe give them fake elections where both candidates are insiders. Maybe provide corporate oversight by a revolving door between the regulators and the regulated. Its all pretty standard propaganda stuff.

cube00 4y ago

> While the tech giant will likely continue to loom large over our lives, from search to email to our calendars, we can delete inactive or unnecessary Google accounts. This is a missed opportunity to recommend good alternatives, especially for email and getting people onto their own domains.

the__alchemist 4y ago

Thx; deleted Spotify. Ended up needing a conversation with their chat bot and email confirmation, but was over in 5 minutes.

hexo 4y ago

How to delete unwanted features from Firefox and bring back wanted ones would come handy as well.

jamal-kumar 4y ago

I left my home country and when I did this people thought I died or something hahaha. I got forwarded screenshots from all these worried people wondering where the fuck I went. Some of them thought I blocked them or something Like no, I just got incredibly sick of being exposed to that level of banality

OtomotO 4y ago

I don't have accounts on any of these platforms. But when I follow people (where possible, e.g. twitter) I only follow people that are interesting or have a completely different worldview than me. I don't want to live in a bubble and I don't need to hear my own opinion, I know it anyway.

ge96 4y ago

I was in high school when FB came out, and man I got sucked into it, posting cringe things everyday. I was lucky I caught myself later on/stopped. Also means I didn't get sucked into TikTok (never used it). I still partake in social media though just accounts not tied to my name. I want to delete my FB account but it has all of my old pictures/videos from childhood. I closed it for now, made another one just for family. The main reason I abandoned my main FB account is too many people that were asking me for money found me and I stupidly accepted their friend requests. I spend most of my time alone though so social media still has a place for me.

97s 4y ago

Deleted all of these years ago besides Google for email. Never looked back, one of the best decisions I have ever made.

yololol 4y ago

It really gets me that Mozilla has adopted this political / activist marketing style. It feels so fake.

Barrin92 4y ago
Mozilla, as in the foundation, is broader than the browser and that blog has been running since 2007 with plenty of privacy focused content on it. The point of Mozilla has always been to advocate for an open internet rather than a corporate one, so I don't see the change in objective here. Firefox is one means to that end. Not sure why "marketing", "political" or "activist" are supposed to be negatives.
- pelasaco 4y ago
  the part "Whether you want to follow in Neil Young’s footsteps or are already streaming music and podcasts through another service, deleting your stagnant Spotify account is a good idea." has nothing to do with privacy, but with an specific agenda.
  - Barrin92 4y ago
    of course they have a specific agenda, it's on their website (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/) I'm slightly out of the loop on the Neil Young stuff but I assume this is about Rogan spreading antivax content or something, which I don't think is very compatible with Mozilla pushing for an internet that is civil, free of misinformation and factual, so it seems to me they're sticking to their principles, which I think are very reasonable.
    - pelasaco 4y ago
      interesting that I see they actually going against their own manifesto, specially the points: - "We are committed to an internet that promotes civil discourse, human dignity, and individual expression." - "We are committed to an internet that elevates critical thinking, reasoned argument, shared knowledge, and verifiable facts." For sure one can paint what Rogan does as "spreading antivax content or something" but that is not what he does.

blackearl 4y ago

How do you delete facebook if you're at the stage where they've requested you upload a photo ID, passport, SSN, lock of hair, and stool sample just to sign in?

throwawayhnacct 4y ago

How to I delete my HN account?? (not this throwaway account, but my real one)

zgk7iqea 4y ago
https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-unofficial-hn-faq/#deleteaccount https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-unofficial-hn-faq/#deleteacc... You can't.

shashashasha___ 4y ago

missing how to delete your Mozilla account?

Ashoka_rkt 4y ago

Though I haven't deleted my social media accounts, I don't use them at all even on an occasional basis. I have them for reaching out to my acquaintances/old friends, access content behind login(when I've been shared with their links), etc. After watching The Social Dilemma(1), I've grown even more averse towards social media. Many regular social media consumers feel that they get useful info out of it along with their entertainment content. Consider this, there are specific sources to get entertainment-netflix,local newspaper website's movie/gossip section,etc. And if one is looking for useful info, the chance of finding the info that is really useful/timely in the specific moment of their life is more via a web search than their infinite feed in their Facebook/twitter/instagram. If you really need an info then you wouldn't rely on random chance/luck that's needed in finding that in your feed. Here in India, WhatsApp is ubiquitous, it is kind of used as a work chat as well when people are logged out of work MSTeams/Skype. So I have WhatsApp installed but I don't go to it to browse the status messages/pics people post, no matter how tempting it is :). I use other more privacy friendly apps for messaging with family and friends. It is hard to tell people to stop using social media, sometimes people find it offending/intrusive. But the perspective of life changes if you don't use social media. You seem to have time for more things in life. We also have to admit that many don't have the luxury(work/professional reasons) to avoid social media altogether. 1- http://thesocialdilemma.com http://thesocialdilemma.com

aendruk 4y ago

The missing follow-up is how to stay in the loop with your friends and family who continue to use these services. Many used to be actively helpful by serving web feeds of public content. Now, not only have they removed the feeds, but they actively sabotage their public website to pressure you back into their control.

davidkuennen 4y ago

Instead of deleting, I usually simply deactivate all notifications by default. I think only 1 or 2 apps are allowed so send notifications and one of them is my own.

notjustanymike 4y ago

Delete. Delete delete delete. Did it a few years back, trust me you won't miss out on anything important. In fact, the opposite: important things will find a way to you regardless. It's the unimportant things that will filter out.

csnti 4y ago

The only reason why I haven't deleted FB is because of the memories shared on there. I haven't posted on my timeline in years. A long time ago, I got spooked when I saw ads that tracked my Google search activity, that's what drove me away from social media in general; an utter lack of respect for the privacy of users. And then I got obsessed with finding out ways to avoid fingerprinting (it's nearly impossible). On the odd occasion I might log-in to see what people are up to, but for the most part I keep in touch with friends and family through text and sometimes Discord. I deleted my linkedin because I kept getting nothing but spam emails, with no actual prospects of a job. Tbh I think that entire platform is a cesspool.

jancsika 4y ago
> And then I got obsessed with finding out ways to avoid fingerprinting (it's nearly impossible). At that point it's worth considering heading to a university library and reading the periodicals and books that are housed there. Obsession = 3+ hours a day attempting to defeat tracking in a category of software designed to track you. I live about 40 minutes away from a decent university library. In your first six days of failing to avoid fingerprinting, I would have gotten nine hours of private, uninterrupted reading time. Even better-- if I chose to read a newspaper in the library, I wouldn't be distracted by a cheapo "companion scroll" taped to the bottom by Silicon Valley types so their underlings can paste "Gellman-Amnesia effect ftw" during breaks in some desperate attempt to misdirect the angst that must come from polishing someone else's ad tech for a living.

enahs-sf 4y ago

Startup idea: wipe yourself from the internet completely as a service.

pipeline_peak 4y ago

Mozilla is sounding less like a browser developer and more like Richard Stallman.

mikojan 4y ago
Good.

wheelerof4te 4y ago

People will always find ways to waste their time. The least you can do is to do it of your own will instead of being pushed into it by conditioning from various social networks.

webchat 4y ago

[dead]

russellbeattie 4y ago

Don't delete the accounts, delete the data in the accounts. That way you can keep your usernames and logins for various services. In 2016 I deleted all the tweets I had made over the previous 9 years, and soon after I backed up then cleaned out my FB profile and unfollowed all my contacts. There was a lot of manual labor involved in this because I had auto imported a bunch of stuff early in FBs life, and it was all sort of stuck in there. FBs crappy API and barely functioning admin UI made it slow going, but it was worth it. As soon as Instagram shows any sign of its popularity waning with my contacts, I'll be deleting all the pics there as well.

tbrockman 4y ago

It’s pretty interesting to see so many people here suggesting that there’s no value to deleting your account. Like the added friction of creating a new account doesn’t make it less likely for you to relapse, or increase the time it takes for it to happen. Like social media applications won’t send you notifications however they can to keep you engaged. Like it doesn’t affect the companies perceived value to lose real users. Like it doesn’t diminish network effects to see fewer of the people you like on the platform. Like retaining the data you’ve contributed doesn’t increase the performance of their machine learning models, broaden their understanding of consumers, or directly provide content for consumption. (okay this point is a bit shaky because it depends on their data deletion policy, or if you can take advantage of CCPA/GDPR, but you get the idea) I agree that leaving or maintaining healthy use of these platforms ultimately requires developing some amount of self-control, but saying that there’s no value to deleting an account doesn’t seem grounded in truth. I found it way easier to just delete the majority of my social media accounts than try to curate or moderate their use. Most social media platforms aren’t built with your best interests at heart, why risk it for some momentarily satisfying content/interactions that you could probably find elsewhere?

LB232323 4y ago

People are realizing that social media is draining, predatory, and entirely superfluous. Of course there are employees here of social media corporations who would want to stem the tide of this mass exodus, but it's useless. Social media corporations have overstepped their boundaries and become a net negative on human society. Deleting your social media accounts results in an immediate improvement of quality of life and mental wellbeing. These sites are intentionally designed with predatory psychological mechanisms, they are designed by hackers like ourselves, but the hackers who see "social engineering" as a perfectly ethical practice and not simply psychological manipulation. These services are designed to be addictive, full stop. Addiction is not healthy, and neither is social media. Maybe this will bring SV back to its roots, real technological progress for the nation and not desperate bids for data mining based on cheap psychological tricks. People are growing sickened of the endless scrolls of psychological disturbing viral content combined with the false positivity of human interest stories. It is deepening social divisions, racial conflicts, political partisanship, and general misery. We don't need social media, what we need is real social connections in an increasingly isolated society, and social media stands in the way of this.

elvis10ten 4y ago
I think social media is just serving people what they want. We can argue if this is a good thing or not. > Addiction is not healthy, and neither is social media. Maybe I’m an old head, but maybe we need more self discipline in the world? I know this is not pragmatic but I feel there are lots of things that are addictive (even things that were not designed to be). > We don't need social media, what we need is real social connections Maybe I’m using social media differently, but what is in today's social media that makes it mutually exclusive to real social connections?
- patrick451 4y ago
  Meth labs are also giving people what they. Even if your take the full libertarian stance that all drugs should be legal, the parent comment did not seem to be advocating for outlawing social media. It was positing that people have realized that social media is an addictive toxin and are deciding, on their own, to bail out. If something is truly addictive, suggesting people develop some self discipline and partake just little seems misguided at best. It's way easier to just abstain completely. Nobody wants to end up like Doug Stamper dispensing three drops of whiskey from syringe onto their tongue.

Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago

I deleted my Facebook account around 2017, then went back under a pseudonym (telling all my friends of this account of course), and then just recreating my old account again. Skip forward five years, I barely login to Facebook at all, even just to check up on friends.

trevorboaconstr 4y ago

One day I asked myself, after I use Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/other social media, how do I feel? The immediate answer was “not good.” Immediately deleted. This was 5 years ago. Not one day have I missed them. Have a LinkedIn in for professional connections. Anyone that I see/communicate with regularly I just text.

stereoradonc 4y ago

Last checked, it was a browser company. It's morphing into an internet agony aunt. Et Tu, Mozilla

Rebelgecko 4y ago

How do I delete my pocket account?

anotherevan 4y ago

> spring cleaning Hope they post this again in six months time for those of us in the southern hemisphere to be able to take advantage of it. :-^

MetroWind 4y ago

Personally I don't see the value in deleting accounts. I just don't use a service if I don't want to. I have not used Facebook for many many many years. It doesn't matter if my account is active or not. Why do I care? If my account is alive, they have to let it take up some of their storage, sucks for them. Twitter has been my main source of news. For the news I care about it has been more reliable than main stream media. But I do understand why some people want to stopping using it. Google is really hard because of YouTube, which is my main source of passive entertainment. Venmo is surprising to me---how do people use Venmo? Are they using it as social network somehow? I just open it when I need to pay someone, and close it when I finish, like using a wallet. Why are people bothered by it?