> What does delete even mean in these circumstances? The best they're able to do is just remove your public profile (if such a thing exists) whilst leaving ever

> What does delete even mean in these circumstances? The best they're able to do is just remove your public profile (if such a thing exists) whilst leaving everything else intact. They should delete everything except what they can't. And I think the same should happen by default with collaborative services like Wikipedia as well (see below). > The very nature of a collaborative work means that removing some contribution from the past could alter the work as it stands today. i.e. Wikipedia Collaboration only makes it more difficult to erase all traces of your use of a service, because other people expect to keep your edits in their timelines. But this has nothing to do with whether or not you should be able to delete your public profile and username/password. It's very easy to delete Github accounts, but any contribution you made to anyone else's repository will continue to exist and have your name in it (because you can't rewrite Git history without breaking a lot of things). That's exactly how anybody with basic knowledge of Git would expect things to work. You can delete your account and your own repositories, but your contributions and other people's forks will remain. With services that don't rely on Git, it's even easier to rewrite history, so there's not even any need to keep your name. For example, Wikipedia could just display a grayed-out [deleted] where it would normally display your name & a link to your profile. Or treat it as an anonymous edit. Or whatever else makes the most sense given their architecture. As long as the ToS clearly states what gets deleted and what doesn't, I don't see any problem with partial deletions. And of course there are always CoD letters and other legal mechanisms for circumstances where you really want to make things disappear.