KOLANICH
commented
3 years ago Determine which gmail to delete next
Why not to just have 1 email account to be used for the most important services, and for the rest of use a disposable email?
My first thought was that this would be a service performed by some company.
If people don't trust Google, why should they trust tue company you mean?
As an alternative, some open source code which automates the email sending and provides a community-maintained customer service email lookup would be sufficient.
Not a viable alternative. Too many services, which are too diverse and have too different ways to unsignup. Some of them don't have an unsignup option at all.
a script that sends a pre-formatted template email to the customer service address listed in the lookup table
And your e-mail account may be banned for spam. Or may not. I have written a bot to request quotes from emails of companies, but it is a very different case. In the case when I request quotes, I want to pay some money to the companies. It is in their best interests to answer and send me the quotes. But in your case you just want them to delete your personal data. It is not in their best interests. Your emails will likely be ignored. Sometimes they may require you to write them a paper letter with your real world identity, and then respond "we have deleted your data", but instead moving them into a separate DB and adding the data from your identity documents there too. You cannot check or ensure that.
So my approach is much simple. If a service provides the feature to download the data, I download the data and archive it somewhere, just to know the lower bound of the data a service has on me. Then, if a service has a feature to delete an account, I request its deletion. I don't beleive the data are really deleted though. Anyway, I change the password to a new one, as strong as the service permits, for the case my old one has been compromised somewhen. Then I just stop using the service.
IMHO what has my deep concern, is the email system is the root of centralization.
Given that currently most of the accounts (that ones that are not tied to cellphone numbers directly) are tied to emails (that are in most cases are mandatorily tied to cellphone numbers directly), it gives email providers a power to deprive you all your accounts. So, email provider controls all your accounts.
It is called that email system is decentralized, but it is deeply centralized. Federation has #clients >> #servers and allows separation of roles between clients and servers in order to achieve security, so to control the system one has to only control the servers.
Trully decentralised systems have #clients=#servers, and no role separation and no trusted parties are allowed to achieve security, instead security is built into protocol design. Such systems have no server owners to control you.
There are some systems, but they are
- likely backdored
- unpopular
- not well-received by websites owners, because it is in the best interests of the most of them to make you rely on a third party that will make you rely on another third party that will require your ID to be given, and then all the three parties have some data to sell to a data merchant. Loss of a link between your account and your ID greatly undermines the usefullness of the data for the customers of the merchant, so for the merchant itself, so for the ones who sell the data to the merchant.
colin-axner
Project description
As of recent I have been attempting to decouple my internet dependencies from the big tech companies. While not impossible, it proves to be a multi-year effort even when deliberately undertaking the effort. One of the most time consuming processes has been trying to delete my google accounts. Due to years of online account signup, my gmail's are listed as the login for hundreds of different accounts. Deleting these accounts or updating the email address manually is extremely time consuming.
Typically the process goes like this:
I've noticed that a large amount of services typically require me to email customer service to delete my account.
I'd like to automate this process as much as possible for people. This would allow less driven folks, who would like to abandon google or another email provider, a reasonable path to do so. My first thought was that this would be a service performed by some company. The likelyhood is no company could sustain itself in this niche. As an alternative, some open source code which automates the email sending and provides a community-maintained customer service email lookup would be sufficient.
The minimum viable product for this would basically just be a script that sends a pre-formatted template email to the customer service address listed in the lookup table when provided a list of services to do this for. More complex solutions may arise in the future, but I have not given them much thought. A better solution will likely present itself after attempting to use the proposed solution. The user will need to provide a list of services to do this for. I suggest initially supporting 2 email templates. One to delete the email and another to change the address. After receiving the customer service response, the user may need to manually take action from there. Based on the regularity of the responses, we may be able to automate this as well.
I might create a repository to do this project, but I have not committed myself to it. I will respond to this issue if I do. Anyone can feel free to lead this project and I will gladly contribute what I can (especially since I will actively use it)
Relevant Technology
The email automation will probably be a script and some JSON blob could be used to maintain the customer service email addresses.
Complexity and required time
Low-complexity. I'd estimate the script could be written fairly fast by someone who has worked with automating emails via code. The JSON parsing should be easy and a CLI command could quickly be hack'd up to support adding customer service emails to the JSON.
Complexity
Required time (ETA)
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