Can I delete my data from the Internet?

[Объединенное Детективное Бюро]

It is no secret that many of us register on different sites and services, leaving our personal data there, and then do not appear there again. Or the service is annoying and you want to delete all your data from there so that you never again appear there. “Rformer” conducted an investigation on this issue and came to the conclusion: in most cases, this will not succeed. Recently, Ruformer has published a translation of a reflection article on the subject of digital data inheritance, abundantly left by the user on the Internet. Since this topic is quite new, researchers have not yet come to a consensus. But what about the data of living people who no longer want to be present on any particular site? Of course, delete them. Only it is unlikely to succeed. We decided to check whether it is possible to delete our data (for example, email address and other contacts) from completely different sites and services. The sites we tested recently were taken as “experimental rabbits”: Runivermag, 4Shared, Classic-online, TunesBag and others. In addition, the experiment involved the portals Free-lance.ru, Mail.ru, the 1001 Cinema torrent resource, a little-known hosting provider Host-food, as well as Nextep, a company engaged in opinion polls. In other words, the company picked up motley. The first surprise we encountered is that on all of the above sites, with the exception of Nextep and Mail.ru, in principle there are no regular means to delete your own account. That is, they are not there initially. Apparently, the creators of these sites do not even think that someone would want to delete their e-mail or other personal data from there. It can be assumed that this parameter depends on the size and authority of a particular portal. On the same Mail.ru there are millions of users, and there the introduction of a regular means for deleting an account is a logical step, in contrast to such a relatively small resource as, say, Classic-online. On two sites of the above (4Shared and Classic-online) in response to a request to delete the account, a letter was received explaining that the account will be deactivated after several months of non-use of the resource - but if you wish, "we can do it right now." The host silently deleted the account after answering a question about why it was needed. But the most interesting story happened with Free-lance.ru - a portal for freelancers. By regular means, deleting your account from this site did not work. I had to send a request for deletion, the answer to which was as follows: “Unfortunately, we do not delete accounts for security purposes. You can clear all information about yourself and no longer visit the profile. Re-registration is prohibited by the site’s rules. ” Correspondence with the portal’s management took four days, an attempt to find out what these “security goals” are and why personal data cannot be deleted, the management of the service stubbornly ignored. In the end, after the promise to write a complaint for the illegal collection of personal information, an instant response letter came with two words: “account deleted”. When you try to log in with a username and a registered (and, in theory, deleted) email account, we get the message "account deleted." From this we can assume that the accounts on this site are not really deleted (since the former user is identified, then the data is still stored in the system). As for all other sites, they simply ignored the request to delete personal data. Letters were sent both using the mailbox and using the feedback forms of the sites themselves - there was no reaction. Why on the vast majority of sites there is no direct function to delete their own accounts and personal data, why some sites refuse to do this in principle, openly or implicitly - there are no answers to these questions yet. It is only clear that on most services that require registration, there is no automatic ability to remove themselves from the database of this service, and the administration is far from always meeting these issues. But the problem exists: and it is quite possible that the database of one or another poorly protected site can easily be stolen or sold by its owners to spammers or anyone worse. "Rformerist"

 

[Матушкин Андрей Николаевич]

Thank!