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.
