Once you’ve edited your posts, what does deleting the account accomplish? Or is it just a self control measure like cutting up your credit card used to be?
No matter who it is, if you’re no longer using a website or app of some kind, it’s best to permanently delete/disable your account. Before you do, scrub as much information as you can, such as deleting any credit card info or address/phone that’s on file. There’s a few reasons for this:
If your security choices (e.g. passwords/2fa) are not the best, someone may compromise your active account through normal means and impersonate you
Even if your security choices are very strong, at some point in the future the site might get compromised by more sophisticated attackers because either (a) the attackers get more sophisticated over time, or (b) the company responsible for account security gets lazier over time;
This is especially true if the site is eventually sold to a scammy company just trying to make a quick buck. And they all eventually get sold.
No matter who owns the company, at some point in the future your contact info will get used to try to market bullshit to you. If not them, then the data brokers they sell your info to.
Deleting the account blocks all of these problems (unless the company is particularly scummy, but what are you gonna do about it)
Got it. So if I never registered an email address or gave them a credit card and overwrote all my comments and used a randomly generated password then there’s basically no risk.
First use a tool like Redact to edit (not delete) all of your comments if you want them as truly gone as they may possibly get.
I did on both accounts 🥲
Once you’ve edited your posts, what does deleting the account accomplish? Or is it just a self control measure like cutting up your credit card used to be?
No matter who it is, if you’re no longer using a website or app of some kind, it’s best to permanently delete/disable your account. Before you do, scrub as much information as you can, such as deleting any credit card info or address/phone that’s on file. There’s a few reasons for this:
Deleting the account blocks all of these problems (unless the company is particularly scummy, but what are you gonna do about it)
Got it. So if I never registered an email address or gave them a credit card and overwrote all my comments and used a randomly generated password then there’s basically no risk.
Just making sure I wasn’t missing something.
cant say this was something i gave any thought to, guess deleting reddit seemed like the default
This won’t actually help. Any competent data engineer is already detecting bulk edits and reverting.
A proper tool would trickle changes over weeks