For some of them I kind of lost access so I would need to write emails to instagram or whatever, for others I would need to remember and to access to each one of them and delete them.
The hardest would be gmail with people having my contacts from like 10 years ago…
I’ve been manually deleting all my actions on my sites. No engagment brings stats down. Then deactivating!
I wish there was a way to infact just poison every one of my interactions. That would be far more fun.
for myself, if i can recover passwords etc, i delete the account to lower the possibility of that data being used to train ai, and to lower the numbers of registered accounts they have.
i think stakeholders are more likely to see accounts being deleted as worse than an inactive account, because people can always come back to an inactive account.
so many websites are eager to keep users by making it difficult to delete accounts, or by adding a 14 day wait before they’ll delete an account, etc., so that alone makes me think they want even inactive accounts for usage statistics or to steal data from.
I dont think deleting your account actually removes the content from their servers just removes the ability to find it for other users. I imagine companies like meta retain everything you put up and is free to train ai with it.
Likely true, but it’d also be a GDPR violation afaik
And we all know that is tech companies follow eu laws.
The one I work for at least tries to. We really don’t like getting penalties and negative press.
I would advise against deleting your account. When you delete your account you also forfeit your username which can then be used to impersonate you. While I’m not sure on the exact math, it would seem logical that having a stagnant account keeps up their costs but doesn’t bring in almost anything resulting in a net loss on an account basis.
I get where this take is coming from, but I’m not sure I agree.
Some social media sites already block new users from using the usernames of deleted users, for just this reason.
And scammers don’t need to copy your username to impersonate you. They just look at your public social media accounts, scrape a bunch of data about you online, and create a new account with a similar name. Then they message your contacts and say “hey, my account got hacked, this is my new account, here’s some personal information so you know it’s me, and also can you send me $500 by iTunes gift card so I can make rent?”. Happens on Facebook all the time.
If you delete your social media account, the social media company still has your data (and probably many many backups of previous versions of your data) and can do whatever they want with it, but, scammers and data aggregators and surveillance agencies without access to that company’s internal data will have more trouble finding it. If you leave your social media account active, though, it’s still accessible to those third parties, and the data on it can help them build their a profile on you.
In other words, deleting your account makes you safer.
On the other hand, it does depend on what data you put on the account in the first place and what data miners can get out of it - in OP’s case, if their Instagram account only has a couple of landscape photos from ten years ago, it probably isn’t worth the effort to reactivate and delete - if it has a ton of person and location tagged photos that could trace where OP was and who they were with for a significant length of time, I’d wipe it.
I would recommend just hiding/removing your content on social media then let it go inactive. There may be some reason in the future you need to utilize the service (looking at you events that are only organized on facebook and restaurants that only post their hours on instagram)
