E.g. you used a service like for job hunting, submitted personal data, landed a job and are now done with it.
Yes, assuming the site allows deleting accounts.
Many don’t have an easy way of deleting accounts. Some won’t delete an account even when making a formal request.
I noticed that with some niche services.
The were some that I wanted to keep but didnt have a way of changing my email adress.
Like why. That can’t be that difficult.Likely bad coding or bad database design.
Best practice is to avoid using email as primary key in the user database, instead use an internal ID, so that an email change can happen without touching the primary key.
Your reply made me think of an alternative to deleting accounts : replace personal information to use a pseudonym and a throwaway email, remove everything that can be removed.
That would help once the badly coded website get hacked or its database get leaked.
I first change my information then delete it. So IE say my name is Don Brown. I change it to Jack Thorton, wait a few days and then delete.
I change the email address before deleting. If the deletion requires email confirmation, I’ll change it to a disposable email address. Otherwise, I’ll make up an email address with a nonexistent domain name
Smart.
I have been using temporary emails for accounts that I don’t think is necessary.
For example, I was trying to mod Stardew Valley and for some reason Nexus Mods requires an account to download, so I just made one using a temporary email and random password.
I’m not gonna delete the account because screw them why would I need an account to download stuff. Imma eat up their storage.
They pay mod authors (like me!) based on unique user downloads. Requiring an account makes it harder to fraudulently inflate numbers, which also benefits the whole community as broadly speaking the most downloaded/endorsed mods are also the best. Bot farming would ruin the site but not paying the most dedicated mod authors would also ruin the site.
