Ever tried to delete your Evernote account? Or attempted to remove yourself from Facebook or Twitter? The likelihood is, it’s not as easy as you think.
There are many reasons for deleting an account with an online service, whether it has become redundant, simply boring or you’d rather not be sharing your information any more. As with all digital media, once it’s out there there’s not much you can do to remove personal data entirely, but surely it should be easy to shut your account on a website?
For some sites it’s as simple as visiting your account page and hitting ‘delete my account’ whereas others make it a lot harder. In UI terms this is often referred to as dark patterns — deliberately hiding or hindering elements through clever design in order to benefit the site rather than the user.
This is where the excellent Just Delete Me can help out. It takes away some of the hard work by listing information on how to delete your account with virtually all major sites. At a quick glance you can see how simple it is to close your account (from ‘Easy’ through to ‘Impossible’), as well as detailed instructions on how to do so. Even better, a Chrome extension can take you right to the correct URL for each individual site.
However there are unbelievably still some major web services that don’t offer this service – if you want to delete your YouTube, Netflix, Pinterest or GoDaddy account for example. You may be out of luck however hard you try, although follow Just Delete Me on Twitter for updates.