5 ms·

Can I delete my Skype account?

178 points by Splendor 12y ago

JBiserkov 12y ago
Mandatory Dilbert http://dilbert.com/2013-11-06/ http://dilbert.com/2013-11-06/ (hint: even closing the thing is not straight-forward)
notfoss 12y ago
I like what GitHub does with a deleted account: https://github.com/ghost https://github.com/ghost
officialjunk 12y ago
and none of that is to actually delete the account. the closest thing is to remove your name from the directory...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
oakwhiz 12y ago
If you contact Skype's support, they can actually delete your account directly, but before they do that, they ask you to replace your profile information with gibberish.
- dan_bk 12y ago
  I would never trust any of the "data-hoovering" companies to actually really delete all of your data, even if they say so. (And in the case of Skype, it's terribly obvious that they want to prevent you from deleting data. In the age of NSA mass surveillance, this absolutely makes sense.)
- GauntletWizard 12y ago
  And I bet if you search that gibberish, it still shows up. And I bet if you recover account on that, it'll still work. Likely, all they're doing is changing the password.
monsterix 12y ago
I recently deleted my Linkedin account. But their junk emails continue to dirty my email even now. Next in the line is Skype, and then probably Facebook. Thankfully, I never shared my genuine data with Facebook or opened an a/c on Instagram or Whatsapp ever so I'm good at a certain level when it comes to Facebook. In my opinion Twitter is the only option that is sane at the moment.
- doctorshady 12y ago
  Funny you say that, I've been constantly getting spammy emails from Twitter. In all fairness to them though, they've been much better about that recently.
- gmu3 12y ago
  I've never even had a Linkedin account and they dirty my email with requests and reminders.
  - rom16384 12y ago
    I tried many times to uncheck all the checkboxes to convince LinkedIn not to send me email, but they ignore them or create new ones, so now I just mark them as spam.
- jvdh 12y ago
  I briefly enabled Google+ for one of my accounts. It has been disabled since at least 6+ months. My colleagues are still getting emails that seem to be coming from me about sharing stuff on Google+.
- okasaki 12y ago
  username+whatever@gmail.com is delivered to username@gmail.com, so if you add the service name when you sign up it's very easy to block unwanted traffic. It also tells you which service sold your email to spammers.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Unless the spammers simply run remove the extra part from the address. A better way is to get your own domain and use a different alias for each service.
lyndonh 12y ago
Skype as software has a lot of issues. Before they were bought by Microsoft the software worked quite well; on my Mac I'm still running an ancient version. Why ? - it got replaced by a version that takes up half your screen, I think they were trying to make a single version for desktop and iPad. After a public outcry they reduced the size somewhat. The latest version has about 3 extra options about the amount of data you will be sharing with Microsoft/associate companies. What ? I want a phone service, I don't want my personal info datamined. OK, they give you the option to disable this but it doesn't fill me with confidence. If you want to use Windows 8 Metro version you must "link" to a Microsoft account and change your login to use that method. It's the first thing that it does, but the UI is very subtle about it. IIRC, it even wants to change your desktop login settings. Phone software should not be changing system settings. Also the latest version removes the option to hide the fact that you have a webcam. With Skype you absolutely must read all the fine print and dialogues.
- laurent123456 12y ago
  Exactly, ever since Microsoft took over Skype definitely went downhill. Another "feature" they've recently added is that it's impossible to actually logout of Skype [1]. Even if you close Skype on all your devices, logout everywhere, your friends will still see you online. I even uninstalled the client from all my machines but was still online after that. The official response is that it's how it should work, that Skype is like a phone and people should be able to send you messages and call you at any time. Of course ignoring the fact that people get upset when they see you online and you're not answering their messages and calls. Since November last years, there have been quite a few complaints about this but nothing has changed so far. [1] http://community.skype.com/t5/Mac/I-show-up-as-Online-when-I-m-not/td-p/2071155 http://community.skype.com/t5/Mac/I-show-up-as-Online-when-I...
- coherentpony 12y ago
  Are there any open source solutions that support both Mac OS X and linux?
- johnward 12y ago
  after the acquisition I started having problem on Mac that would freeze everything when failing on skype. I thought it was probably a coincidence but it's seems to continue to get worse. I belive they fixed whatever bug was causing my freezing issues after over a year. by that time a basically gave up on skype.
acjduncan 12y ago
This is completely insane. How can a company with so many developers think this is anything other than completely unacceptable.
- alandarev 12y ago
  Developers are not allowed to think about it ;-)
- cyphax 12y ago
  I think they find it acceptable because, well, people seem to be accepting it. The majority doesn't seem to be interested in deleting any accounts but simply abandon them. I do wonder why Microsoft/Skype prefers accounts not be deleted, though? Message history perhaps? When designing databases, this is a matter that's important: do you delete objects or do you flag them deleted to prevent holes in the related data? Obviously I've no idea if that's what is going on at all, but who knows. :)
emersonrsantos 12y ago
You never put information online, delete stuff, use anonymous accounts and VPNs, yet everyone is a victim of device fingerprinting tecnhiques. That's one way the governments finds "anonymous" TOR users. Check the online test https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/ and the paper https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf for a good read.
asadlionpk 12y ago
Maybe this is because of the way they store the data. It might be an expensive query (in their case) to search all contact lists with your skypeID, and remove it.
- shoq 12y ago
  That just means, that they are too lazy to implement a delete queue or something. What's more likely is, that they audit and persist profile changes to gather data even if you "deleted" your account.
taspeotis 12y ago
As far as I know this is about the same process for HN? http://www.accountkiller.com/en/delete-hacker-news-account http://www.accountkiller.com/en/delete-hacker-news-account
- woof 12y ago
  Skype makes it hard to leave/unsubscribe just to inflate their user base (aka "value"). It's pretty common when there's a economical incentive to do so. On HN it's hard/impossible to delete a user without breaking and/or destroying core functionality (ie submissions and discussion). So what's you point?
  - X4 12y ago
    This makes all the other pro data contention arguments moot, I agree with woof. Whatever company, ideology or other room anomaly disturbs the views of people who think that that data (aka content) should be undeletable "because", is hereby just devalued in the argumentative value.
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  I would be happy if they just added a feature to change your username. It's not too difficult to decipher my real identity from my HN username and I'd like to use something more anonymous. And fwiw a couple of years back I tried emailing the addresses mentioned in that link with no luck.
  - buro9 12y ago
    That should be possible, but again... technology. If it wasn't thought about when the software was designed then it can cause very nasty issues and be hard to rectify. One of the forums I run on vBulletin has over 4m posts, 2m private messages, 45k users. vBulletin is MySQL and tries to reduce database load through denormalisation of the data. The posts table has the username repeated every time a post was made, and the private message table has a horrible PHP serialized array containing the username in the "To:" column for a private message. Changing a username on vBulletin involves an UPDATE statement on the post table, which is fine... but it involves iterating through every private message, de-serialising the To information, modifying and putting back. And vBulletin is MySQL, and the search is full_text, which means MyISAM tables, and the update of the private message table locks for the duration, and for a large number of private messages the table is locked for 15 minutes on that particular server... which is enough time to cause a domino effect of query waits that PHP runs out of memory and one by one my frontend servers fail and the site goes offline. Yup, vBulletin will crash and take the site offline if you have a large number of private messages and want to change a username. You can see the fun of explaining this to the users of one forum over here: https://www.lfgss.com/thread95475.html https://www.lfgss.com/thread95475.html This is one of the very many annoyances that has led me to create http://microco.sm/ http://microco.sm/ to fix this (and many other) pain points for admins and users. The software design is stopping users doing things they want to do (change their username). HN isn't running vBulletin. But the logic is much the same. If it wasn't thought about on day one the data structures likely do not permit an efficient changing of username. HN is under substantially more load than the forums I run, and dang likely deals with far more performance related issues. I'm sure he can reveal HNs specific design flaw that prevents username changes. Or perhaps it's just the idea that it's a social problem and that if patio11 changed to patm that it would break the context for all previous mentions of him. Again... software should have solved this, but only if it was thought about early enough. The lack of avatars does mean that the username on HN is a far more critical identifier.
jon_black 12y ago
The question I'm more interested in is why a sane delete option isn't built into the service. On the other hand, it's at least clear that your account exists forever, although it would be better if people were aware of that during sign up. Twitter claims to have deleted my account, but I cannot verify it. As a side note, amazon affiliate accounts are equally bad.
- ss64 12y ago
  Presumably if you have an account JohnSmith, that will be held locally on the computers of all your contacts, if the account was deleted and someone else registered a new JohnSmith account then your old contacts could end up calling a complete stranger. Microsoft could have some process that records dead accounts and automatically deletes them from the contact lists of the billions of computers running skype, but imagine the problems when someone deletes their account by mistake (or has it hijacked and deleted by a third party) and wants it restored. Now the better approach might be to associate each JohnSmith account with a unique ID that never gets recycled and then reject calls unless the account_IDs match. But that's probably a lot of re-engineering that they don't want to do.
  - jon_black 12y ago
    I don't think the reason is to prevent accidental/destructive deletion. There are better ways to do that such as providing a grace period; allowing users to download their account data for a future re-signup; and two-factor authentication. It's more likely that the revenue earned by the service is heavily dependent on building a social profile. A properly deleted (without a trace) account reduces the profile accuracy. I also wouldn't rule out the almost too obvious government surveillance requirement.
emeraldd 12y ago
Here's a question, would actually deleting the account lead to the possibility of someone later impersonating the original account holder? Especially since the "buddy" lists appear to be independent?
- kintamanimatt 12y ago
  The way a lot of other sites do it is to disallow new accounts to be created with the same username as a deleted account. Reddit does it like this.
  - toufka 12y ago
    What then happens when the site ages significantly? Pulling a Yahoo is pretty scary in my mind. I'm still curious about how those with common, re-purposed emails have fared since yahoo reset all their unused accounts.
kristiandupont 12y ago
I don't know, is this a problem? In some sense, it seems more honest to me than having a delete button that simply sets a "deleted" flag on you in a database.
- Splendor 12y ago
  It's a problem for me because people have created four Skype accounts with my email address so far and there's no way to delete them.
- grrowl 12y ago
  It's representative of the values they hold as a company. If you can't be bothered allowing your users' control over their own data, it says a lot about their deeper intentions.
  - if_by_whisky 12y ago
    Most companies give you less control though. Setting a deleted flag is worse, isn't it?
    - Kequc 12y ago
      There is a certain accountability that is assumed after I delete my account for that account not to show up again somewhere some time. If all they do is set a flag in a database maybe that's good enough. But if they wanted to go further maybe they could scrub the data associated with it too. But that shouldn't be my domain, that should be their domain to take these measures. I should simply have to state my intention.
cshimmin 12y ago
I guess Betteridge's law of headlines could have saved me from reading this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
- kintamanimatt 12y ago
  And as a result you'd have missed out on Skype's tap dancing and sidestepping around the issue. This submission also promotes a key issue: your Skype account is for life, or at least until Skype becomes passé and irrelevant, and shuts down.
granttimmerman 12y ago
This is extremely relevant: http://justdelete.me/ http://justdelete.me/
- eik3_de 12y ago
  It's a great service, I just added Lobsters. Adding a service takes 2 minutes, using the online editor from github that automatically creates a pull request etc. Edit: and already merged & deployed less than an hour later. Contributing is fun :)
  - rmlewisuk 12y ago
    You caught me on a good day for merging pull requests ;) thanks for the contribution, always appreciated :)
joelthelion 12y ago
Very professional

178 points by Splendor 12y ago

Mandatory Dilbert http://dilbert.com/2013-11-06/ http://dilbert.com/2013-11-06/ (hint: even closing the thing is not straight-forward)

notfoss 12y ago

I like what GitHub does with a deleted account: https://github.com/ghost https://github.com/ghost

officialjunk 12y ago

and none of that is to actually delete the account. the closest thing is to remove your name from the directory...

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

oakwhiz 12y ago

If you contact Skype's support, they can actually delete your account directly, but before they do that, they ask you to replace your profile information with gibberish.

dan_bk 12y ago
I would never trust any of the "data-hoovering" companies to actually really delete all of your data, even if they say so. (And in the case of Skype, it's terribly obvious that they want to prevent you from deleting data. In the age of NSA mass surveillance, this absolutely makes sense.)
GauntletWizard 12y ago
And I bet if you search that gibberish, it still shows up. And I bet if you recover account on that, it'll still work. Likely, all they're doing is changing the password.

monsterix 12y ago

I recently deleted my Linkedin account. But their junk emails continue to dirty my email even now. Next in the line is Skype, and then probably Facebook. Thankfully, I never shared my genuine data with Facebook or opened an a/c on Instagram or Whatsapp ever so I'm good at a certain level when it comes to Facebook. In my opinion Twitter is the only option that is sane at the moment.

doctorshady 12y ago
Funny you say that, I've been constantly getting spammy emails from Twitter. In all fairness to them though, they've been much better about that recently.
gmu3 12y ago
I've never even had a Linkedin account and they dirty my email with requests and reminders.
- rom16384 12y ago
  I tried many times to uncheck all the checkboxes to convince LinkedIn not to send me email, but they ignore them or create new ones, so now I just mark them as spam.
jvdh 12y ago
I briefly enabled Google+ for one of my accounts. It has been disabled since at least 6+ months. My colleagues are still getting emails that seem to be coming from me about sharing stuff on Google+.
okasaki 12y ago
username+whatever@gmail.com is delivered to username@gmail.com, so if you add the service name when you sign up it's very easy to block unwanted traffic. It also tells you which service sold your email to spammers.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Unless the spammers simply run remove the extra part from the address. A better way is to get your own domain and use a different alias for each service.

lyndonh 12y ago

Skype as software has a lot of issues. Before they were bought by Microsoft the software worked quite well; on my Mac I'm still running an ancient version. Why ? - it got replaced by a version that takes up half your screen, I think they were trying to make a single version for desktop and iPad. After a public outcry they reduced the size somewhat. The latest version has about 3 extra options about the amount of data you will be sharing with Microsoft/associate companies. What ? I want a phone service, I don't want my personal info datamined. OK, they give you the option to disable this but it doesn't fill me with confidence. If you want to use Windows 8 Metro version you must "link" to a Microsoft account and change your login to use that method. It's the first thing that it does, but the UI is very subtle about it. IIRC, it even wants to change your desktop login settings. Phone software should not be changing system settings. Also the latest version removes the option to hide the fact that you have a webcam. With Skype you absolutely must read all the fine print and dialogues.

laurent123456 12y ago
Exactly, ever since Microsoft took over Skype definitely went downhill. Another "feature" they've recently added is that it's impossible to actually logout of Skype [1]. Even if you close Skype on all your devices, logout everywhere, your friends will still see you online. I even uninstalled the client from all my machines but was still online after that. The official response is that it's how it should work, that Skype is like a phone and people should be able to send you messages and call you at any time. Of course ignoring the fact that people get upset when they see you online and you're not answering their messages and calls. Since November last years, there have been quite a few complaints about this but nothing has changed so far. [1] http://community.skype.com/t5/Mac/I-show-up-as-Online-when-I-m-not/td-p/2071155 http://community.skype.com/t5/Mac/I-show-up-as-Online-when-I...
coherentpony 12y ago
Are there any open source solutions that support both Mac OS X and linux?
johnward 12y ago
after the acquisition I started having problem on Mac that would freeze everything when failing on skype. I thought it was probably a coincidence but it's seems to continue to get worse. I belive they fixed whatever bug was causing my freezing issues after over a year. by that time a basically gave up on skype.

acjduncan 12y ago

This is completely insane. How can a company with so many developers think this is anything other than completely unacceptable.

alandarev 12y ago
Developers are not allowed to think about it ;-)
cyphax 12y ago
I think they find it acceptable because, well, people seem to be accepting it. The majority doesn't seem to be interested in deleting any accounts but simply abandon them. I do wonder why Microsoft/Skype prefers accounts not be deleted, though? Message history perhaps? When designing databases, this is a matter that's important: do you delete objects or do you flag them deleted to prevent holes in the related data? Obviously I've no idea if that's what is going on at all, but who knows. :)

emersonrsantos 12y ago

You never put information online, delete stuff, use anonymous accounts and VPNs, yet everyone is a victim of device fingerprinting tecnhiques. That's one way the governments finds "anonymous" TOR users. Check the online test https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/ and the paper https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf for a good read.

asadlionpk 12y ago

Maybe this is because of the way they store the data. It might be an expensive query (in their case) to search all contact lists with your skypeID, and remove it.

shoq 12y ago
That just means, that they are too lazy to implement a delete queue or something. What's more likely is, that they audit and persist profile changes to gather data even if you "deleted" your account.

taspeotis 12y ago

As far as I know this is about the same process for HN? http://www.accountkiller.com/en/delete-hacker-news-account http://www.accountkiller.com/en/delete-hacker-news-account

woof 12y ago
Skype makes it hard to leave/unsubscribe just to inflate their user base (aka "value"). It's pretty common when there's a economical incentive to do so. On HN it's hard/impossible to delete a user without breaking and/or destroying core functionality (ie submissions and discussion). So what's you point?
- X4 12y ago
  This makes all the other pro data contention arguments moot, I agree with woof. Whatever company, ideology or other room anomaly disturbs the views of people who think that that data (aka content) should be undeletable "because", is hereby just devalued in the argumentative value.
k-mcgrady 12y ago
I would be happy if they just added a feature to change your username. It's not too difficult to decipher my real identity from my HN username and I'd like to use something more anonymous. And fwiw a couple of years back I tried emailing the addresses mentioned in that link with no luck.
- buro9 12y ago
  That should be possible, but again... technology. If it wasn't thought about when the software was designed then it can cause very nasty issues and be hard to rectify. One of the forums I run on vBulletin has over 4m posts, 2m private messages, 45k users. vBulletin is MySQL and tries to reduce database load through denormalisation of the data. The posts table has the username repeated every time a post was made, and the private message table has a horrible PHP serialized array containing the username in the "To:" column for a private message. Changing a username on vBulletin involves an UPDATE statement on the post table, which is fine... but it involves iterating through every private message, de-serialising the To information, modifying and putting back. And vBulletin is MySQL, and the search is full_text, which means MyISAM tables, and the update of the private message table locks for the duration, and for a large number of private messages the table is locked for 15 minutes on that particular server... which is enough time to cause a domino effect of query waits that PHP runs out of memory and one by one my frontend servers fail and the site goes offline. Yup, vBulletin will crash and take the site offline if you have a large number of private messages and want to change a username. You can see the fun of explaining this to the users of one forum over here: https://www.lfgss.com/thread95475.html https://www.lfgss.com/thread95475.html This is one of the very many annoyances that has led me to create http://microco.sm/ http://microco.sm/ to fix this (and many other) pain points for admins and users. The software design is stopping users doing things they want to do (change their username). HN isn't running vBulletin. But the logic is much the same. If it wasn't thought about on day one the data structures likely do not permit an efficient changing of username. HN is under substantially more load than the forums I run, and dang likely deals with far more performance related issues. I'm sure he can reveal HNs specific design flaw that prevents username changes. Or perhaps it's just the idea that it's a social problem and that if patio11 changed to patm that it would break the context for all previous mentions of him. Again... software should have solved this, but only if it was thought about early enough. The lack of avatars does mean that the username on HN is a far more critical identifier.

jon_black 12y ago

The question I'm more interested in is why a sane delete option isn't built into the service. On the other hand, it's at least clear that your account exists forever, although it would be better if people were aware of that during sign up. Twitter claims to have deleted my account, but I cannot verify it. As a side note, amazon affiliate accounts are equally bad.

ss64 12y ago
Presumably if you have an account JohnSmith, that will be held locally on the computers of all your contacts, if the account was deleted and someone else registered a new JohnSmith account then your old contacts could end up calling a complete stranger. Microsoft could have some process that records dead accounts and automatically deletes them from the contact lists of the billions of computers running skype, but imagine the problems when someone deletes their account by mistake (or has it hijacked and deleted by a third party) and wants it restored. Now the better approach might be to associate each JohnSmith account with a unique ID that never gets recycled and then reject calls unless the account_IDs match. But that's probably a lot of re-engineering that they don't want to do.
- jon_black 12y ago
  I don't think the reason is to prevent accidental/destructive deletion. There are better ways to do that such as providing a grace period; allowing users to download their account data for a future re-signup; and two-factor authentication. It's more likely that the revenue earned by the service is heavily dependent on building a social profile. A properly deleted (without a trace) account reduces the profile accuracy. I also wouldn't rule out the almost too obvious government surveillance requirement.

emeraldd 12y ago

Here's a question, would actually deleting the account lead to the possibility of someone later impersonating the original account holder? Especially since the "buddy" lists appear to be independent?

kintamanimatt 12y ago
The way a lot of other sites do it is to disallow new accounts to be created with the same username as a deleted account. Reddit does it like this.
- toufka 12y ago
  What then happens when the site ages significantly? Pulling a Yahoo is pretty scary in my mind. I'm still curious about how those with common, re-purposed emails have fared since yahoo reset all their unused accounts.

kristiandupont 12y ago

I don't know, is this a problem? In some sense, it seems more honest to me than having a delete button that simply sets a "deleted" flag on you in a database.

Splendor 12y ago
It's a problem for me because people have created four Skype accounts with my email address so far and there's no way to delete them.
grrowl 12y ago
It's representative of the values they hold as a company. If you can't be bothered allowing your users' control over their own data, it says a lot about their deeper intentions.
- if_by_whisky 12y ago
  Most companies give you less control though. Setting a deleted flag is worse, isn't it?
  - Kequc 12y ago
    There is a certain accountability that is assumed after I delete my account for that account not to show up again somewhere some time. If all they do is set a flag in a database maybe that's good enough. But if they wanted to go further maybe they could scrub the data associated with it too. But that shouldn't be my domain, that should be their domain to take these measures. I should simply have to state my intention.

cshimmin 12y ago

I guess Betteridge's law of headlines could have saved me from reading this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

kintamanimatt 12y ago
And as a result you'd have missed out on Skype's tap dancing and sidestepping around the issue. This submission also promotes a key issue: your Skype account is for life, or at least until Skype becomes passé and irrelevant, and shuts down.

granttimmerman 12y ago

This is extremely relevant: http://justdelete.me/ http://justdelete.me/

eik3_de 12y ago
It's a great service, I just added Lobsters. Adding a service takes 2 minutes, using the online editor from github that automatically creates a pull request etc. Edit: and already merged & deployed less than an hour later. Contributing is fun :)
- rmlewisuk 12y ago
  You caught me on a good day for merging pull requests ;) thanks for the contribution, always appreciated :)

joelthelion 12y ago

Very professional