How to delete online accounts that you no longer use + Tips and Tricks

If you have been on the Internet for a long time, it is likely that you have accumulated dozens of online accounts to access the enormous number of services offered by the Network of networks. Some you will use regularly and others sporadically. But there will be a good number of them that you do not use for anything and should be removed. The deletion process should be as simple as the creation process, but you have surely found that this is not always the case. We try to help you in a task that we should carry out regularly to improve privacy and reduce the risk of attacks.

Personal data is a gold mine in the era of full connectivity that we live in. For companies that make a living from it and also for cybercriminals. Data breaches in services large and small and abuses in the advertising industry are the order of the day as we saw in this summary with the worst incidents of 2020. What happens when they breach a large internet service and leak the data personal? What happens if a rogue provider sells your data to third parties, abuses your stored credit card numbers, or uses the data to send spam?

If you’ve reused passwords, a site breach means attackers can gain access to your accounts from others. Even if you don’t, the personal data associated with online accounts that you don’t use can put attackers on track, for example with answers to security questions from other websites.

To protect privacy, it is a good idea delete your private data from services you no longer use. You can do this by deleting these types of accounts rather than simply leaving them inactive. It is advisable to do cleaning from time to time (whenever possible because it is not easy in all cases) because you can always create a new one again if in the future.

How to find active online accounts

It is the first step. If you do not have them written down in a physical place outside the Internet, there are several places where you can find them, such as:

Password manager. If you use this type of manager, be it internal to web browsers or third-party providers, as we recommend, you will have a good database to search in the first place. There you will see many of the accounts that you have active.

Email. Virtually all subscriptions to Internet services are verified by email messages. If you search your email client for related keywords like “accounts,” “welcome,” “verification,” “test,” or the like, you are likely to discover old accounts that you may not even remember.

Facebook, Google o Twitter. Many service providers allow user access without having to create an account on their own site, but connected to the general account of the Internet giants. You can check the Facebook or Google settings to see the third-party accounts that you access through this method and that you probably won’t find on other sites.

Have I been hacked? have i been pwned? is one of the most complete portals when it comes to checking passwords that have been compromised. In addition to informing us of the hacked passwords so that we can change them, it is likely that the associated email account will provide us with clues of other services to which we have subscribed.

How to delete old online accounts

Once the accounts are located, we must decide which ones to delete. Don’t be shy because the process is reversible if in the future you want to use it. In fact, although it should be the opposite, it is much more difficult to delete an account online than to create one. Some tips to eliminate them:

• Visit the website support page and look for information on how to delete accounts. You can also check their privacy policy for specific details. Delete the account and also request the deletion of your data.
• Access a specialized site like JustDelete.me, which offers a convenient database with instructions for deleting a wide variety of online accounts. Its removal capacity is shown on the basis of colored labels. From green (easy) to black indicating that it is simply impossible.
• If you can’t delete an account with the previous two methods, tap on doing an internet search for that specific site and see if any users have been able to do so. If you are a European user, you should know that the privacy regulation, GDRP, establishes the ‘right to be forgotten’ in article 17 and the consumer can rescind or cancel any contract on the Internet since their data is deleted from a certain storage place .

What if I can’t delete an account?

If you can’t delete an account, there are things you can do to protect your private data to some degree. Log in to the account and follow these tips:

• Delete any saved payment and financial information, such as credit card numbers that make it easy for anyone with access to the account to make purchases.
• Delete any private data that you have stored in the application. Especially those related to personal data such as note taking, pending tasks or calendars.
• Delete personal identification details saved as your name, date of birth, shipping address and the most personal details.

The general idea, if the account cannot be completely deleted, is to get rid of any personal data that attackers could use in the event of a breach. Reinforcing the previous point, another good option is anonymize the account. that is, link it to a fake email.

Anonymous email services such as Mailinator can be used for this. In this way and once the personal data has been deleted, all the account information it will be useless for an attacker can profit from data theft.

Don’t hand over your details so cheerfully

It’s funny, but in the virtual world we do things that we would never do in the physical world, probably mistakenly thinking that they don’t have the same consequences. Consider being more selective about the online accounts to which you are going to subscribe and that 99% of you will have to provide personal data. Is it really worth it?

Think twice before registering with an Internet service that you will use little or nothing because it is much more difficult to eliminate it than to create it. And clean up those online accounts that, like all Internet users, we will have dozens of unused ones and that are an attack vector for data theft, identity theft, and sending of phishing and spam.