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…
With “deletion” you’re simply advancing the moment, they’re supposedly “deleting” your data; something I refuse to believe, they actually do. Instead, I suspect they “anonymize”, or effectively “pseudonymize” the data (as cross-referencing is trivial, when showing equal patterns on a new account; would the need arise). Stagnation wouldn’t require services to take such steps, and any personal data remains connected to you, personally.
For the Gmail account, I would recommend: not deleting the account, opening an account at a privacy-respecting service (using Disroot as an example), connect the Gmail account to an email-client (like Thunderbird), copy all its contents (including ‘sent’ or other specific folders) to a local folder (making sure to back these up periodically), delete all contents from the Gmail server, and simply wait for incoming messages, at the now empty Gmail account.
If a worthy email comes in: copy it over to the local folder, and delete it from the Gmail server. For used services, you could change the contact address to the Disroot account, and for others you could delete them, or simply mark them as spam (and periodically emptying the spam-folder). You may not want to wait for privacy-sensitive services, to finally make an appearance, and change these over to the Disroot address right away.
I’ve been doing this for years now, and my big-tech accounts remain empty most of the time. Do make sure to transfer every folder, and make regular backups!
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.
deleted by creator
Send an email to people you care about with your new email, they reply or not it’s OK you still have their email address anyway, no big deal.
Source : I’ve migrated away from GMail.
Instagram/Facebook I would just delete. Maybe make a final post explaining why you’re deleting and say “find me on Pixelfed” just to help spread the word.
For Reddit, I love when see people replace every comment they ever made with a link to Lemmy before deleting their account. Reddit shows comments from deleted accounts so they stay up. There are apps that will do this for you.
For Gmail just hold onto and have it forward to your new address in case someone tries to contact you that way. But also back it up with Google takeout in case Google randomly decides to delete the account (rare but it happens).
Should you delete your dead accounts, let them be taken over by some spammer or wait for a password leak?
Just don’t use them beyond the minimum. I need facebook to keep in contact with some people I know and for groups on there but I just check in once a week or so. linkedin I need for job hunting. once I retire I will keep it around to give people recommendations if I need to. honstely I abandone twitter but I only ever made one to stake my name. youtube is nice to keep track of creators I like but I mostly watch it not logged in. got rid of my reddit because the federation covers that.
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.
There is with Reddit! If you browse enough old posts you’ll inevitably come across a profile who’s history entirely consists of “I’ve quit and gone to Lemmy”.
More like “red cook lift land sand sun loft soft yes bag – this message was deleted by redact”
I was thinking that we am actually good use for AI. Please crawl through all my interactions and replace them with psycobabble and horticulture quote.
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.
A reasonable argument and I agree that impersonation is still possible without the scammer taking the excact username but it’ll still be easier to fool your contacts when you don’t have an active account.
For example consider two worlds - in one you have an instagram account, in the other you don’t. The world in which you have the account, people who only know you through that account and don’t use other platforms where you’re on, are less likely to fall victim to scams because they can always verify that the scammers account isn’t your account. In the other world this isn’t possible and thus it is more likely people who don’t know you directly will believe the scammer.
Also my point on the cost of the account still stands. I do admit that having an open account which gets scraped is an issue but if you have a “private” account, most of the 3rd parties lose access to it’s content. Although I’m sure three letter agencies and meta have a custom API which can query all accounts, public or private, the point you’re trying to make is moot, as if we’re talking about opsec, if you already have an (insta) account, all it’s data is logged somewhere and it likely won’t be deleted in the near future.
My process is to rewrite old posts with generic text like “this message has been deleted” or something along those lines.
Then I choose to delete the post and after some period I would delete the account.
This prevents a company from eating up your past history as AI training data or recovering your deleted posts to some extent.
Editing old posts doesn’t prevent them from being used for training AI data. It would prevent the data from being scraped, but Reddit, X, Meta, etc. are certainly storing all of your edits and training models on them, both internally and for third-parties who are paying for that data.
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)
Instagram - posts can still be checked in a browser without logging in. Imginn exists too if you want to browse a profile.
Facebook - Anecdotal, but I have not had a Facebook account in 20 years and I can safely say I’ve never once had FOMO or trouble finding information on an event. If it’s a private social gathering that’s worth going to, someone will invite me.
I have an old Facebook account that I’ve lost the password to. I still have access to the email it’s associated with, but to reset the password (and subsequently delete the account) I’d have to prove my identity to Facebook. Which I can’t because I didn’t use my real name.
Now the account is oxidizing on Facebooks servers; I sometimes get “someone tried to log in to your account” emails and I’m like “go, take it, have fun!”.
Basically, if I can I delete old accounts, if I can’t… Well its not my servers that get cluttered with old shit.
i just keep them. do backup all useful data from the accounts even if you don’t remove them tho. for gmail setup forwarding to your new mail account.
