Can I delete my Skype account?

I guess Betteridge's law of headlines could have saved me from reading this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

Presumably if you have an account JohnSmith, that will be held locally on the computers of all your contacts, if the account was deleted and someone else registered a new JohnSmith account then your old contacts could end up calling a complete stranger.

Microsoft could have some process that records dead accounts and automatically deletes them from the contact lists of the billions of computers running skype, but imagine the problems when someone deletes their account by mistake (or has it hijacked and deleted by a third party) and wants it restored.

Now the better approach might be to associate each JohnSmith account with a unique ID that never gets recycled and then reject calls unless the account_IDs match. But that's probably a lot of re-engineering that they don't want to do.

It's representative of the values they hold as a company. If you can't be bothered allowing your users' control over their own data, it says a lot about their deeper intentions.

I would be happy if they just added a feature to change your username. It's not too difficult to decipher my real identity from my HN username and I'd like to use something more anonymous. And fwiw a couple of years back I tried emailing the addresses mentioned in that link with no luck.

Nearly all forums do this or some form of this.

Your account and personal information may be deleted, but all of your comments, submissions, conversations, threads or whatever you call the collected bulk of user generated content will remain.

The reason for this is that a forum is a collaborative effort, a collective work, and the contributions of other people's content might only make sense in the context of yours.

The general stance is that a conversation is an audited history, and to change the historical record affects other people's content too by redefining the context.

Taking this very conversation as an example if you deleted your account and your comment, mine now makes far less sense.

Most forum admins agree that you have the right to edit your content, but not to modify/affect someone else's. Changing the historical record affects the content of others.

Thus, most forums will ask for the right to reproduce your user content even after your account has been deleted. This preserves the context of other people's content.

Beyond that... account deletion. The internals of most forum software is based on foreign keys or data structures that presume integrity of the data. To delete a user account whilst retaining the content created by the account breaks their software.

So for a lot of forums deleting a user actually means keeping the user record but scrubbing it of identifiable information. The problem then comes that whilst the account may no longer exist in a meaningful sense, the content might still have personal identifiable information and will now be orphaned and detached from any meaningful record of ownership. Liability just became a nightmare for the forum admin.

The question of how to handle work contributed to a collective work that is a forum is a sticky one. But ultimately the value of the forum to the people who will continue to use it is based on the collective work remaining intact. The content will always survive, and then it's just implementation that dictates what deletion of an account really means for the given piece of software.