The challenge of deleting old online accounts | Loudwhisper
A few days ago I decided to continue working on a project I am planning (and barely executing) for quite a while: my “Digital Resiliency Plan.” I am planning to write about this here eventually, but essentially it’s just a nice way to say “get my stuff in order” when it comes to digital data, especially in terms of safety of the data (e.g., backups) and the ability to maintain access to it in most circumstances.
A crucial piece of my digital information includes the credentials to access the many services I rely on, which are stored in my password manager. While I currently use Bitwarden and back up the data regularly, I wanted to try one-way-syncing all the entries into Proton Pass, since I have it included in my subscription and it could work as a simple, fully functional “offsite” backup. Before doing so, I took the silly decision of cleaning up the existing items in Bitwarden, so that I wouldn’t duplicate useless entries that will require multiple deletion in the future. I call this decision silly because there are virtually no downsides to having stale items in a password manager, and because this activity has required more than 20 hours of actual work, essentially eating up all the time I wanted to spend on the broader project.
But hey, what’s done is done, and I think there is plenty of value, especially from a privacy perspective, in ensuring your own data is not scattered all over the internet. This post will therefore cover my relatively monotonous adventure in what it means and what it takes going through about 15 years of online accounts, trying to delete your data. In doing so, I will compile a top 10 list for what I found to be the funniest or most interesting experiences. Let’s begin.
