You see them everywhere. They tell you to perform an action. They tell you to associate yourself with a certain brand name in order to get benefits. These things are signs, signs of different kinds telling you to create accounts and memberships on different websites so that you can be able to post comments and view private content. Whether they are images with the words “Sign up!” or written words saying “Create a free account“, the signs to entice you into signing up are everywhere.
What many of such signs and websites forget to tell you is that once you open an account, it may be impossible to ever close and delete your account and any private information from such sites. Today we ponder over the question: Why do many websites and online services not allow you to close and delete your account?
Easy to create your online account. Impossible to delete it?
Like the stereotypical car sales men from the 90′s, many websites of today show and tell you many things to get you to create an account with them. You are even sometimes sent a “Thank you!” e-mail, making sure you feel so special that you tell your neighbors about your adventure of joining a cool website. And then it happens. After hours, days or weeks, you lose interest, or you get harassed like a bunny. You decide to cancel and delete your account. That is when you realize that breaking up from a 20-year old relationship may be easier than canceling and deleting an online account.
Many websites like PeoplePC.com seem to make you call customer support in order to cancel your account. Why do you have to call the billing department to cancel your account when you are allowed to create your account online? There can be many reasons why some websites do not close your accounts. Some websites simply do not have that functionality available on a wide-scale, while other websites want to keep the number of open accounts high in order to attract investors. Still, other websites simply focus on people creating accounts and making purchases through those accounts, and people not wanting to remain on the site anymore are not part of their focus at all. Whatever the reason, in the end, you are usually left with an online account with your name, username, password, e-mail address, home address, phone number and many other pieces of private information sitting on an information bank, probably waiting to be utilized at some future date.
Some online services which do not allow you to completely close and delete your account.
The following websites offer no way to delete your account. They do not offer any information as to how you can delete your account permanently and completely, and e-mailing their tech support does not seem to help either.
- Art .com. I e-mailed Art.com asking them to delete my account, and as a response, I got instructions on how to unsubscribe from their newsletter. Of course, I am still getting the newsletter, and also have an account there that I cannot close.
- Performancing Ads .com. There is absolutely no way to delete your account, and their help pages have no information on the words “delete“, “close” and “deactivate.“
- Oovoo .com. I e-mailed and contacted Oovoo support to delete my account and was told that the only way to do that was to:
“go to FILE/EDIT MY OOvOO CARD/ Once there please remove any personal information, your picture (by replacing it with something else), and your email address (enter a bogus one). Please also change your display name to “inactive”. Click “Save”, and then just abandon the account. This will close it.” –according to ooVoo staff Dave.I realized and found out that the above comment meant that Oovoo does not allow you to completely delete and close your account and personal information. All it offers is to change some of your private information to bogus information and to simply not login. Of course, your own personal ooVoo username can never be changed and remains active forever.
- FedEx .com . FedEx allows you to create an online account to track packages, send packages and create personal and business accounts for shipping and delivery. FedEx, unlike UPS, does not offer a way to delete and close your “My FedEx” account at all, resulting in all your information stored forever on the FedEx website.
- Anthropologie.com. The famous clothing and home apparel store website does not offer any account or personal information deletion feature. All your anthropological purchases are saved forever, just like the field of anthropology would love it.
- eBay group subscriptions. If you are subscribed to any eBay group and then you delete your account, your group subscriptions can remain active. That means eBay will keep emailing you the eBay group announcements, replies, and other notifications. Contacting support will not help at all, as I have experienced so far.
- iStockPhoto .com . The famous royalty stock photo website allows you to create and account and either sell or buy pictures. It does not, however, allow you to realize that you can stop being interested in their service and can delete your online account there. You can find dozens of links telling you to buy subscriptions and pictures. You will find zero links to tell you how you can close your iStockPhoto account.
- Zooomr .com. While there is no information whatsoever as to how a Zooomr account can be completely closed, there is information on Zooomr help groups about people having their Zooomr account disabled without any explanation and Zooomr ignoring such people publicly on the discussion forums. People’s requests to have their Zooomr accounts deleted have been ignored and unanswered for months on the Zoomr groups.
- Alaska Airlines .com. Many online airlines like American, United and SouthWest allow travelers to create and manage online airline accounts related to their miles and memberships. At the same time, however, airlines like Alaska Air and Jet Blue do not allow users to delete their online airline accounts. Once again, easy to book an airline ticket and an online airline account, and very hard to cancel either.
- DeviantART .com. DeviantART does not allow you to delete your account. Just like Oovoo, you can only edit some of your existing information and replace it with bogus information. You can also manually delete all your DeviantART content. Your DeviantART account stays alive forever, however.
- PeoplePC .com. There may be reasons to believe PeoplePC tries to ignore people who want to cancel their PeoplePC account.
- Pizza Hut .com. Your hunger forces you to go online and order 2 large pizzas, 8 bread sticks, 8 spicy chicken wings and 2 large Sprites. However, when it comes to deleting your online PizzaHut.com account login and related information, neither hunger nor starvation can help you. There is no link to delete your PizzaHut.com account, and asking any Pizza Hut staff at any Pizza Hut location makes that staff member want to call the center for disease control because of your strange question.
- Buy.com . Like many other websites, Buy.com makes it extremely easy to sign up for an account. However, there is absolutely no information whatsoever as to how you can delete all your personal information from their site, and how can you can permanently close your account.
Above are some of the thousands of online websites and services which do not allow you to delete your online account with them easily, or at all.
Would you like the ability to delete your online accounts on different websites?
Searching online can help figure out whether others online have instructions to help delete different online accounts. So why do these websites themselves do not allow you to easily close your account? Should not the happiness and convenience of a potential client or even a visitor be kept in mind, even when they are leaving you? Should not the idea of being able to close an account be as easy as opening an account?
Please let me and others know what you think by sharing in the comments below.
Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed sharing it with you, and I hope you can get your unwanted online account deleted. 
As for me, I am off to e-mail the wonderful Orbitz and Priceline people to see if I can beg them to close my accounts.
:O thankfully i dont have those above account :O
Great post BZain!!
.-= rmilana´s last blog ..Be friend =-.
Hi Bes, nice blog you have here. I happen to find this blog while doing some idle browsing. I think sometimes sites don't expect people to de-activate their accounts. They just expect people who don't want to use the site to .. not use the site.
Perhaps the reason is purely technical.. like there are no flags to mark an account status … so removing the account means deleting it from the database and it will probably screw up foreign key reference and stuff?
Just a guess
Anyway, props to you for coding most of your own site in PHP ! have added you to my bookmarks !
.-= Alvin´s last blog ..Yes, I know you are big and mighty and have been … =-.
Hi Bes,
Yes, this is very annoying when you can't close an account.
If we are looking for an explanation, I think you found it. There's no focus on this problem at these companies. They may be too busy building their customer/fan base. They may not have enough resources to focus on a problem like loosing customers/fans. ANd I guess in their eyes there's no harm in having an unused account out there…
Thanks: Rob
rmilana, thanks for the comment!
Do you have any accounts that you wish to close or delete, or have you ever deleted an account before?
Thanks again! Myu Kimbala!
Alvin, thanks also. I really appreciate the nice words.
Yes, many websites and people simply expect the uninterested people to go away and disappear. However, with so much information lying around, there should be an option to have such information deleted in case someone wants it annihilated.
Hmmm, that is an interesting and a good point. So what you are saying is that many sites have not coded themselves while keeping the concept of account deletion in mind, and thus if they delete an account on a regular basis, it might ruin or corrupt their database?
Thanks for adding the site to your bookmark, Alvin.
Rob Nolan, thanks for the comment too!
I agree that many companies simply focus on the concept of creating more accounts and gaining more fans and customers, the way Alvin may have hinted in a technical manner above.
Yes, for them, there is no harm in having an extra un-logged-in account lying around, though the customer may simply want that account deleted.
Have you ever closed or deleted an account before?
Thanks again all!
Gr8!! idea and a great blog. I appreciate your work & hope for some more informative information.
Any you wonder why people put in false info. Most of those services need your real info, so I understand where you are coming from.
.-= alphainventions´s last blog .. =-.
Guilty. I have registered for some of those sites.
I like your feature of edit the comment up to 60 minutes. Rarely found such features. It will reduce the mistakes.
That's why I have few names on the web which are not true.
Yep, it is very annoying, the fact of closing an account should be considered at the very same moment of opening one! if you want to offer a way to enter, you also have to offer a way to leave! the very popular gravatar.com website does not allow you to close your account either…
Hi friends, Here is very good study and review of peoples mentalities and tactics they play with common people. I appreciate this effort reveling the hidden truths of Internet.
My two-cents worth: next time you sign up for an account, do not tick those nice offers you see, even if those are for newsletter signups only. They will just clutter your email inbox and sometimes they use your information for marketing. Also, make it necessary to check if the site let's you delete accounts in the future. Most of the new sites now have this capability.
It's time to take things seriously when it comes to the internet or else your name and profile would be all over the place soon. Now, that's what you called privacy.
That's why it's important to read the TOS if privacy is important to you. In this age of the internet and access worldwide by smart phones our privacy is not an option.
Using pen names and setting up dummy accounts is one way around this problem.
Ahhh add Baby Center to that, too. Supposedly you can email them and get them to "close" it (note, note delete) but I have now emailed twice with no response.
Every website should have a canceling feature easily accessible to the user.
I forgot all about art.com… hmmm….
Yeah there was another one I was thinking about earlier today too but I can't remember what it was called exactly. I find it occasionally when I Google myself though and I want my account removed! The stupid thing is that the site is no longer in operation but the guy keeps it open and there despite no new activity over the last few years. Just close the blasted thing, it never was that great of a site anyway!
Nice Solid list of deleting and managing online accounts! Ever had any thoughts about how to delete the accounts of a friend or deceased family member?
I currently work as an Intern at Entrustet.com. It is a service based company that offers people with an easy way to pass on their digital assets (facebook, youtube, yahoo.com, etc accounts) to their heirs after they pass away. We have been compiling a list of how to deal with accounts of those who have passed.
Think you could share your thoughts? http://blog.entrustet.com/digital-executor-toolbo…
DT
All the examples that you have mentioned in this blog is really very much interesting. And I feel that all these examples can be used practically. Thanks for sharing.
In my country there is a law that states that all companies have to tell you what information they store about you. You just have to mail them. But mostly all companies ignore such requests.
Do the next best thing and sign-in and then fill your profile with TRASH/JUNK data. I like to use their email addresses/domain and their own address and then abandon the account and let them send themselves spam…
!@#$%^&* these douchebag sites!
This is such a great resource that you are providing and you give it away for free. I enjoy seeing websites that understand the value of providing a prime resource for free. I truly loved reading your site. Thanks!
What a blog post!! Very informative and also easy to understand. Looking for more such comments!! Have a facebook? I recommended it on digg. The only thing that it’s missing is a bit of new design. However thank you for this information.
Don't you have laws against this in the USA?
I would expect them to be obligated to remove any information they have about you if you so request.
This is very annoying.
Yes I have the same problem. I was on Zoosk and I still get emails after I had already deleted the account. So I checked to see if my account was still really deleted, and took me to a site saying I can still recover the info if I log back in. Same thing with Plenty of Fish.
i think the best thing to do is that before you sign up for an account, better to read their policy because personally i don’t read any of them. lol
Customer retention and attraction are indeed the essential reasons. You wouldn’t believe developers are able to create a complex site with account management, *but* they’re unfortunately too dumb to take care of account deletion.
Anyway. The ultimate list for account deletion seems to be http://www.accountkiller.com these days. At least, I didn’t find a more complete overview.
On 1/13/2005 I talked w/ someone named Carolyn with Fedex asking her to delete my account. About 10 months later, on 11/4/2005, I discovered that my account was still active. Calling Fedex again, I talked with someone named Darrel and asked again to have my account deleted. I was assured that it would be and didn’t think about it again until today (10/29/2011) while I was deleting some other unwanted online accounts. I just checked and even though it has been six years, the account it still active. This is outrageous. I suppose all I can do is try to change all my info to bogus junk so that they will not be able to charge me if someone happens to put my account number on a package. Of course, Fedex probably keeps tack of account changes to make sure they can always locate the original creator of the account. This is extremely aggravating considering that I no doubt agreed to pay for anything shipped using the account number they assigned to me. I am actually surprised I have not received a bill in the last six years for someone sending a package and using my account number. It can’t be that hard to guess a valid number.
Its like you read my mind! You seem to understand so much approximately this, such as you wrote
the book in it or something. I think that you just could
do with some p.c. to force the message house a
bit, but instead of that, this is magnificent blog.
A great read. I will definitely be back.