The DataPortability Project

Cameron Chapman explains How To Permanently Delete Your Account on Popular Websites. Perhaps your site’s Portability Policy should answer these questions:

How?

• If you don’t allow account deletion, why?
• What steps do you take to prevent someone else from deleting my account?
• What steps do you take to prevent me from deleting my account when I might regret it? (a moment of anger, intoxicated confusion, suffering from dreadful lack of coordination
• Do you distinguish between account deletion and deactivation?
• How long will it take for my account to be invisible to others?
• How long before my account is gone forever?
• If I delete my account, can others claim my username?
• If I delete my account, will I be able to use my email address to create a new account?
• What happens if I don’t have access to the email address I used to start the account?
• What can delay account closure? (For example, pending financial transactions?)
• Where is the procedure for deleting my account? What happens after I make the request?

Completeness

• Where is the list of authorized software/services that might log into my account? (So I can turn them off.)
• If you let me log into other sites with your credentials (“Sign in with your X account”), what happens to my accounts on the other sites? Where is the list of sites where I use your credentials to login?
• When you delete my profile and account, what happens to shared/community content, like my contributions to a wiki page or to a threaded conversation or gifts to another person?
• When I delete my account, do you also cancel subscriptions to any related premium services?
• Do you make downloading and saving my assets (photos, contacts, history, etc.) part of the account deletion process?
• When I delete my account, do you also delete my contributions (like videos on YouTube) or should I delete those before requesting account deletion?
• If I have money or credit balances in my account, what happens to that money when I delete my account?
• What do you do to help reduce search engine caching of and links to my deleted profile and resources?
• What do you do with my answer to “Why do you want to delete your account?”

Continue reading Deleting Your Account: Data portability policy questions for a graceful exit