A Little Known Privacy Technique
If you’ve ever watched a YouTube video you’ve likely heard way too much about VPNs (mostly though not completely useless for privacy purposes) and DeleteMe (possibly a little helpful for keeping your offline information out of some white pages type sites). However, did you ever wonder where these sites and many other marketers and spammers get your information from in the first place? There are actually many sources, but one place most people don’t think of is the stores you’ve shopped at. These days almost every online merchant you’ve ever registered for an account with freely sells your personal information to anyone and everyone. I don’t know any way to keep them all from doing it but you an reduce the scope of the problem. Here’s how.
Generally many, perhaps most sites that have collected your info from you will let you delete your account. This doesn’t simply delete your login. It completely anonymizes or removes all your information (name, phone number, email, etc.) from their databases. Not all sites offer this, not all sites can necessarily be trusted to do it, and sites may sell or transfer your information to third parties before you do this, but speaking as a software developer who’s worked on such anonymization and deletion systems in the past, it works more often than it doesn’t and it’s worth doing where you can.
Depending on the state and country where you reside, companies might be legally required to delete some or all of your data when asked. Not all companies follow the law here, but many do. A California resident has more legal rights here than a New York resident, but many compannies simply implement data deletion for everyone instead of trying to follow the minimum policies for each of 50 states and 100+ countries.
Even if your data has already been sold out the front door (and it probably has), new uses for this data are being found all the time. Right now a lot of companies are figuring out that they can bundle up all their legacy customer data and sell it for machine learning training. Deleting that data now will at least keep it from being sold to more companies in the future.
I started by deleting my Ticketmaster account, which had been screwed up so badly that it cost me over $1000 in unusable tickets and the only option was to delete and start over. I don’t think TicketMaster wanted to steal my tickets to see David Gilmore. That’s just the sort of incompetence monopolies protect. Anyway here’s where you can delete your TicketMaster account. Do this after you’ve seen all the shows you’ve bought tickets to. Create a new account later if you want to buy tickets for something else.
I deleted my Wal-mart account after I noticed them linking my in person purchases to my online account. I’m not sure how they did that — probably via matching credit card numbers since they don’t have a loyalty program — but however they did it, that account is gone now, along with the record of my purchases.
I deleted my Expedia account several years ago after they failed to refund me money I was owed one too many times. It wasn’t enough to sue them over, but it was enough to switch travel providers.
I also occasionally scroll through my password manager to find other accounts I’m not actively using and delete a couple more of them every time.
For any particular store, simply Google “Delete Foo Account” and usually the right page or instructions will pop right up. Don’t do this for anything you actually need to keep, but that nutrition store or florist you ordered from that one time? Delete them. This won’t remove your home or email address from corporate data spammers, but every site likely has unique information on you — Which hotels do you like to stay in? Where do you travel? Will you pay extra for fast shipping? — that no one else has, and it’s worthwhile deleting that when and where you can.
