Account Deletion
In my course, I have already talked about one of the main measures to combat leaks – deleting all unused accounts. I would be very surprised if any of you do not have old, forgotten, and unused accounts; I have found dozens of them.
The dangers of such abandoned accounts are best illustrated by the stories of victims of the secret dating service for married people, Ashley Madison. The site was hacked, and thousands of accounts became publicly available, many of whose owners had long stopped using the service.
You probably wouldn’t like it if your correspondence from years ago ended up publicly available as a result of a leak, in the hands of your enemies or competitors. Leaks usually occur when a service is hacked, and if your account is not there, then your data will not be leaked either.
How to do this? Of course, you can sit down and try to remember where you had accounts, but memory is an unreliable helper in this case, especially when it comes to years. Therefore, I want to offer you two methods for finding the sites where you have accounts.
But even before starting, I recommend checking whether your data has already been involved in leaks; this check will take no more than a minute. I talked about it in more detail in this chapter.
Services for Finding and Deleting Accounts
The first method is to use services for finding and deleting accounts. There are several services that offer these services for free. I recommend deseat.me (the site is no longer available, an alternative is JustDelete.me), which is suitable for Gmail and Outlook users.
This service finds accounts and allows you to send a deletion request in a couple of clicks. Unfortunately, it does not know all sites, especially it is poorly acquainted with Russian-speaking ones, so it is not a complete replacement for manual searching, but only a supplement.
How does it work? You log in to deseat.me, granting it reading and sending rights. The service scans your mailbox, finds the sites it knows, and then offers you to send deletion requests for accounts on them. You decide which of them to keep and which to delete. The deletion request is sent by clicking the "Request Removal" button.