It's fairly understandable that delete from a retailer is hard. In many places retailers are under obligation to store records relating to transactions for things like tax compliance, agreements with credit providers, anti-fraud and accounting laws. i.e. Amazon
What does delete even mean in these circumstances? The best they're able to do is just remove your public profile (if such a thing exists) whilst leaving everything else intact.
It's also understandable that collaborative works have no real delete (as the end user perceives it). The very nature of a collaborative work means that removing some contribution from the past could alter the work as it stands today. i.e. Wikipedia
What's really surprising are the media outlets on the list with the high level of difficulty. The EU data protection laws only permit a company to retain that data which is necessary to provide a service, for as long as the service is provided or the company is obliged (by law) to keep the information. Those outlets (Gawker) seem to hide under the collaborative works stuff, but if you've an account but never made a comment then deletion shouldn't be objected to.
General rules:
If there was a monetary transaction they're going to keep your info but might delete your public profile.
If it's a collaborative work you might get your profile deleted but all of your contributions will remain as a public record.
If it's an interaction with the government you're never going to get it deleted.
> What does delete even mean in these circumstances? The best they're able to do is just remove your public profile (if such a thing exists) whilst leaving everything else intact.
They should delete everything except what they can't.
And I think the same should happen by default with collaborative services like Wikipedia as well (see below).
> The very nature of a collaborative work means that removing some contribution from the past could alter the work as it stands today. i.e. Wikipedia
Collaboration only makes it more difficult to erase all traces of your use of a service, because other people expect to keep your edits in their timelines. But this has nothing to do with whether or not you should be able to delete your public profile and username/password.
It's very easy to delete Github accounts, but any contribution you made to anyone else's repository will continue to exist and have your name in it (because you can't rewrite Git history without breaking a lot of things). That's exactly how anybody with basic knowledge of Git would expect things to work. You can delete your account and your own repositories, but your contributions and other people's forks will remain.
With services that don't rely on Git, it's even easier to rewrite history, so there's not even any need to keep your name. For example, Wikipedia could just display a grayed-out [deleted] where it would normally display your name & a link to your profile. Or treat it as an anonymous edit. Or whatever else makes the most sense given their architecture.
As long as the ToS clearly states what gets deleted and what doesn't, I don't see any problem with partial deletions. And of course there are always CoD letters and other legal mechanisms for circumstances where you really want to make things disappear.
What they can and should do is remove all you data that relates to you excluding invoices (which should just copy your data and not simply reference it) and logs that you need to keep per some law.
Exactly. Since I can buy on some internet retailers without creating an account, there is no logical reason why another retailer can't delete my account. I understand that they need to store the invoice, but that could be stored separately from the marketing database.
The way I'm going to use this list is to look up services before I sign up.
I'd also be interested to see if user satisfaction correlates with ease of quitting. It seems like companies which make it hard for users to quit do so because many users want to quit. Anecdotally this holds true for the handful of companies on that list I've used, but I'd like to see some actual stats.
Deleting an account from Quora, including deleting all your contributions, is not easy. It requires sending an email and waiting for them to run some script which can take a long time. So unless Quora changed this, which I doubt, that page needs to be updated.
I work at Quora. A few things:
1) I agree the statement on this page is not accurate, emailing is certainly not as easy as other products.
2) We are committed to people who use, or have used, Quora. Our turnaround time for deleting accounts has improved greatly in the past year and should be within about 48 hours (excluding weekends, I mean, seriously.)
3) We've considered a one-click solution and may one day provide that. For now, we use the email solution because it avoids accidental deletion (I understand the skepticism here, but believe it or not, many people who have sent explicit delete requests in by email have later asked to have their account restored – we can't restore a deleted account, because, you know, deleted.) Offering a one click deletion from a settings page opens up a lot of confusion for people who assume that delete is some sort of soft "goodbye" with the chance to return later. Our soft delete is called "deactivation" which should de-index your content from Google, hide your name and halt all email and notifications from Quora to you. This is effective for a lot of people, but if you want your content straight up deleted, please email privacy@quora.com, and we will take care of it.
Thank you, but just FYI, Quora sucks and you should find a new place to work.
It's a shitty crowd sourced product that gives nothing back to the crowd. The deletion policy sucks. The inability to delete your own content (without deleting your account) sucks. The way Quora forces people to login to see content sucks. Forcing people to use real names sucks. The user interface, which at this point looks pretty dated, sucks. The product sucks. You can't get answers to questions which sucks. People with lots of followers get all the upvotes, which sucks. Emphasising the social login buttons at every turn and hiding the email login sucks. The community (never as impressive as people made it out to be because one time many years ago the former CEO of AOL answered something) sucks. The admonishment to be ready to dedicate your life (haha!) to Quora on the jobs page sucks big fucking time. By the way how's that working out for you? Worth it? Probably not. Getting a ton of VC money because Quora's founder had some friends at Facebook and then building a piece of shit? Also pretty sucky.
Can you tell I don't like Quora? My only interaction with Quora has been through its product. I haven't had a Quora account in over a year and I still foam at the mouth at the thought of this site. There's a reason I wanted to delete my account. It's a sinister and manipulative product that connives value (user contributions) out of people and returns walls for the favor. I had quite a bit of content on Quora. I think I got overcharged like $40 by some scammy website in the last year and I am already over that, but I never got scammed for money from Quora but I still cringe at the site in a way that's entirely unique and singular. Quora sucks.
You sound very passionate about Quora, actually, but a lot of what you've stated here isn't true, or is no longer true, I'm happy to respond to each thing, but your position sounds pretty ideological, that is, I don't think there's anything I can say that will make you stop foaming at the mouth over Quora, which is too bad.
I said a lot, not everything, you've chosen three, I'm happy to respond:
A full name is required to add content to Quora, if you just want to browse, you aren't stopped from doing that with a different/fake name, just ask https://www.quora.com/John-Smith-3000?share=1
We ask people to log in to see content, but it's not required, you can add ?share=1 to the end of any Quora URL to see the content. We also don't require login to view posts. More about that here: https://blog.quora.com/Making-Sharing-Better
Questions aren't "yours" answers and posts are though. Questions are a collaborative resource, so not unlike an entire Wikipedia page, you can't delete it as an individual, though if there are no answers to the question, you can delete it within a particular window of activity. If you go anonymous on the question your name won't be associated with it, same thing if you delete your account. More on question ownership here: https://www.quora.com/Quora-Policies-and-Guidelines/What-is-...
I respect that you clearly feel that Quora should work differently than it does, and that's fine, we've continued to make changes and improvements, some which people like, some which people don't, but the goal is to create a great resource for people, if you think it's not a great resource and it's useless to you, we'll keep trying to improve, though that may never align with what your expectations are.
I requested removal from Quora last week. 27 hours later someone from user operations emailed me confirming it was done. Perhaps they did improve the process recently.
It irked me that when I deactivated my account, it wasn't immediately obvious that it hadn't been deleted. I only found that out when I saw the page was still live on Google.
I then contacted their customer service to find out why it hadn't been deleted. Their customer service team was responsive and helpful, and it was deleted within 24 hours.
We’ve deleted your account information from our end.
However, if you are already in a search engine like Google’s search index, they won’t know to drop you from it until they try to re-crawl your page, and unfortunately we don’t have any control over when that will happen. The best thing to do in the meantime is to directly request removal from Google itself here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals. Once you have submitted your request(s), you will need to wait for Google to reindex the pages — this often takes a few days.
Because Google will remove it from their index when they revisit the page organically. If Google provides a way to programmatically send removal requests, I'd be happy to hear about it and I will pass it along to the team that deals with account deletions so we can make it part of our flow.
Right now, I am only aware of the Google webmaster tools where you have to input each individual link you want removed, and even that request is queued and takes time, with no guarantee that they will reindex the content.
I'm not sure how they (or anyone really) prove that they actually removed all information, other than running something like 'select name from users' and sending you the results so that you can see that your name isn't there.
If they send you all info that they have about you, that doesn't prove that account has been removed, it only proves that they have all your data.
They will not delete your account but upon request they
can “scramble all of your information so that you don’t
receive emails and none of your information is available
to [them] for potential fraud”.
Makes sense. Their customer database is likely mostly for supply-chain management and affiliate marketing. They don't want to remove people, because it screws up the statistics (e.g. number of visits in the last month.) So they just irreversibly anonymize your data instead.
Also useful is namechk.com. I didn't even know I had an account on some of these sites. It turned out I had a 5 year old reddit account, a 6 year old account on ebay, and more. Of course, I deleted most of them.
pg has commented on this on HN before, the basic gist is that HN is like a newsgroup, you've submitted your comments in the public and just like Usenet, they are there to stay. Separate to that, if you were to delete your account and its comments, it would leave existing threads confusing and incoherent.
What does delete even mean in these circumstances? The best they're able to do is just remove your public profile (if such a thing exists) whilst leaving everything else intact.
It's also understandable that collaborative works have no real delete (as the end user perceives it). The very nature of a collaborative work means that removing some contribution from the past could alter the work as it stands today. i.e. Wikipedia
What's really surprising are the media outlets on the list with the high level of difficulty. The EU data protection laws only permit a company to retain that data which is necessary to provide a service, for as long as the service is provided or the company is obliged (by law) to keep the information. Those outlets (Gawker) seem to hide under the collaborative works stuff, but if you've an account but never made a comment then deletion shouldn't be objected to.
General rules:
If there was a monetary transaction they're going to keep your info but might delete your public profile.
If it's a collaborative work you might get your profile deleted but all of your contributions will remain as a public record.
If it's an interaction with the government you're never going to get it deleted.