In the last days I spent a disproportionate amount deleting old accounts I found in my password manager, and mostly because so many companies - despite the GDPR - have rudimentary, manually when not completely nonexistent processes to delete your data.
In this post I describe my process going through about 100 old accounts and trying to delete them all, including a top 10 for the weirdest, funniest or most interesting cases I encountered while doing so.
I’ve been doing this.
I also realized the importance of not just using a different (strong) password on each site, but using a different email, and using a different username.
I had quite a few accounts to modify/delete, and I realized if I did 5-10 per day that I could accomplish it in less than a few months, with very little stress.
Well, good news. I finished last week.
Congratulations on completing this!
I have indeed moved most accounts to individual aliases. I used to use the same username and similar emails (perhaps grouped like shops@mydomain), but I got no benefit and the username allowed unnecessary correlations.
So alias + random username and I will have much much less trouble in the future. Hopefully!
The “development team” literally replaced my username with “DELETED”, supposedly in a literal interpretation of “can you delete this user?” request, and that’s it.
Should’ve asked "can you admin this user? 😅
Eh, the thing is I made the formal request using data deletion module, but I just assumed that’s what the support person asked the development person (“team”), assuming it was not the same person for both!
Great read thanks. It’s a quest I have stated here and there but you methods an awareness gives inspiration to the tedious task. Would you be willing to share the email template you used?
Thanks for the kind words!
I won’t take credits for the template, I have used the one found here: https://www.datarequests.org/blog/sample-letter-gdpr-erasure-request/
I’ve been thinking about this topic this week as well for some reason, so this is timely for me. Thanks for posting.
