Deleting your profile, as is well known by those who have tried to do it, can be very difficult. When it goes well, a single click on the “delete account” key should be enough. However it’s more than likely, that this key is very well hidden in the site settings and you will be asked a series of questions before you can delete your account. Sometimes, what should be very straightforward, it is made even more difficult and to confirm your decision you might have to phone or write an e-mail to the support department (as with Amazon and for Apple iTunes). It could be even worse with certain sites (like Wikipedia or Pinterest) where, for one reason or another, deleting your account (and related personal data) completely becomes, in fact, impossible.
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Why our profiles are so valuable Companies that provide internet services, in particular those who manage social networks, usually derive their profits through the sale of targeted advertisements. Their success here depends on the amount of data they have available and the consequent ability to analyze user habits, interests of their friends, etc. Therefore when we decide to erase them, they seek to hinder us. We have picked a few platforms that you may come across in your day-to-day working life and looked in depth at how to delete yourself from them.
AMAZON: Complicated First of all, a warning: if you decide to close your Amazon account, remember to save all the books you have on Kindle to your computer. This is because when your profile and digital library are empty the first time your device synchronizes with amazon it will lose all content. However, you can load them back onto your kindle via a USB cable from your computer. To unsubscribe there is still some way to go. Head over to the ‘Help-Menu’: under ‘Manage my account’ click on ‘Change settings’. You will eventually arrive at ‘delete the account’, but it’s not over yet, you now have to make a request – via email, chat or phone – and must provide for safety reasons, the number of the last order you placed and the date. Your cancellation will usually be confirmed within 24 hours.
GOOGLE: Easy When it comes to privacy and personal data Google does not enjoy a good reputation among the people of the internet, and yet to say goodbye them is quite simple. All you need to do is click on your “icon” at the top right, then ‘Account’, and finally on the last item, ‘Close account and delete all services’. Once you have deleted your Google account, it will even erase your links to other Google products, such as YouTube, Gmail and BlogSpot. You will need confirm on the next screen that you are 100% sure you wish to delete your account.
FACEBOOK: Challenging The king of social networking offers its member’s two possibilities of escape; disable or delete the account. It goes without saying that if your aim is to erase your social network tracks, the option to choose is the latter, because with the first option you would elements that you have published such as messages, post and photos comments will be left visible. How do you delete the profile in a more permanent way? Instead of hunting the ‘delete’ option through the various menus (assuming it really exists somewhere!) it’s worth writing directly ‘delete account’ in the Service Center and following their links and instructions: in a couple of clicks, it’s all done. Well, almost, because for the following days, if you try to log in, the account reactivates and you have to start the procedure again. The same can also happen if you use an external application that you had connected to your Facebook account.
TWITTER: Easy “Are you sure you don’t want to re-think? Was it something we said? Please, let us know.” Clearly Twitter feels sorry for people who delete the account. However, they do nothing to hide the way out. This way out, incidentally, is taken by opening ‘Settings’ (the gear icon) and clicking ‘Deactivate My Account’ at the bottom of the page. If you want, before you click ‘Ok, fine’ you can send an archive of all of your tweets to your email address. After few minutes, the account will not be visible anymore – but you are able to re-activate it within 30 days if you change your mind. SKYPE: Challenging Until last year it was impossible to close a skype account. Now, thanks to the intervention of the Ombudsman for privacy, conditions have improved, although it remains a fairly cumbersome procedure. First of all, if the main objective is to make yourself invisible when others search for you, you have to delete all the data entered in your Profile. Because your personal details cannot be left blank, you can use the trick of filling each personal data box with a few letters. You can change the email address in the same way. To remove your profile picture, you have to open the program and select Edit Profile Picture in the menu. Mission accomplished? Not yet. If you want to make the last step toward skype oblivion – removing your name from the list – you need to send a message to Support and within two weeks you will be deleted. Be careful though, because even after all the rigmarole, your name will continue to be among the people who had you as a contact.
WIKIPEDIA: Impossible To consult the famous free encyclopedia there is no need to register. Only those who also want to contribute to the creation of content have to create an account. What if one day you decide to delete it? Here comes the problem: once created, a ‘user account’ cannot currently be deleted because this could cause malfunctions to the site. Therefore the most efficient way to vanish is to stop writing contributions and request a change of user name from the ‘bureaucrats’ – the group of volunteers appointed by the community to manage some technical aspects of Wikipedia. In this way, in subsequent research, traces of your old profile won’t remain. You can also ask to remove or disable access to the pages you have created. However, this may not be the solution, because in certain situations – for example in the case of the authors of numerous interventions or for those pages that are inside large projects – the Wikimedia Foundation reserves the right not to delete the information or to reactivate deleted data at any time. LINKEDIN: Demanding Are you thinking of deleting your LinkedIn profile? It is simple, but the problem is that even after closing the account you will continue to receive invitations from other members who wish to add you to their network.
If you want to avoid being bombarded by these messages, which can be frequent and annoying, you will need to write an email to Support and ask them to add your address to the list of blocked emails. Once deleted your profile will be not be visible to
other LinkedIn users with immediate effect and to search engines like Google and Yahoo within a few weeks. To close your account: Select ‘Privacy & Settings’ by placing your mouse cursor over the photo, on the top left corner. Then click at the bottom on ‘Account’ then the link to close your account is located on the right side of the screen. Before giving the final confirmation, by typing your password one last time, you will be asked the reason for your decision.
INSTAGRAM Easy As we’ve shown, with most social media accounts after you close your account you can always retrace your steps and ask to reactivate it. The social networks that offer this possibility argue that it is precisely for this purpose that, even for profiles that are closed, that they must retain a copy of the materials (pictures, videos, personal information) previously uploaded. However, with Instagram this is not an option! Your personal data is really deleted. To remove yourself requires very little time; after logging, click on your Profile Picture, and scroll through the menu to ‘Edit Profile’. Here you can completely remove your profile, user name, e-mail address and personal info, but if you click directly on ‘I want to delete the account’ all images will be deleted too.