this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
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In the last days I spent a disproportionate amount deleting old accounts I found in my password manager, and mostly because so many companies - despite the GDPR - have rudimentary, manually when not completely nonexistent processes to delete your data.

In this post I describe my process going through about 100 old accounts and trying to delete them all, including a top 10 for the weirdest, funniest or most interesting cases I encountered while doing so.

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[–] obvs@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I've been doing this.

I also realized the importance of not just using a different (strong) password on each site, but using a different email, and using a different username.

I had quite a few accounts to modify/delete, and I realized if I did 5-10 per day that I could accomplish it in less than a few months, with very little stress.

Well, good news. I finished last week.

[–] loudwhisper@infosec.pub 4 points 1 day ago

Congratulations on completing this!

I have indeed moved most accounts to individual aliases. I used to use the same username and similar emails (perhaps grouped like shops@mydomain), but I got no benefit and the username allowed unnecessary correlations.

So alias + random username and I will have much much less trouble in the future. Hopefully!

[–] nimble@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The “development team” literally replaced my username with “DELETED”, supposedly in a literal interpretation of “can you delete this user?” request, and that’s it.

Should've asked "can you admin this user? 😅

[–] loudwhisper@infosec.pub 1 points 1 day ago

Eh, the thing is I made the formal request using data deletion module, but I just assumed that's what the support person asked the development person ("team"), assuming it was not the same person for both!

[–] Cherry@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Great read thanks. It’s a quest I have stated here and there but you methods an awareness gives inspiration to the tedious task. Would you be willing to share the email template you used?

[–] loudwhisper@infosec.pub 3 points 1 day ago

Thanks for the kind words!

I won't take credits for the template, I have used the one found here: https://www.datarequests.org/blog/sample-letter-gdpr-erasure-request/

[–] higgsboson@dubvee.org 3 points 1 day ago

I've been thinking about this topic this week as well for some reason, so this is timely for me. Thanks for posting.