61–70 of 74 posts
I want to know the names of assholes in charge of this company so that I can avoid ever working with them.
Next step: form letters that make a formal request for the deletion of all information related to you. Won't work either but, like this, it's a nice start.
A pretty simple set of form letters you could automatically fill out and have submitted to the major credit bureaus, marketing agencies, and the (then) handful of companies which maintained active marketing lists.
I printed and mailed a small sheaf of letters based on this during the summer of 2001. A month or so later, 9/11 hit, followed by the anthrax mailing scare. I was rather happy to have had far less junk mail to sort through, given the mood of the times -- every piece of mail not received was one more bit of dread avoided.
The results of that persisted for years. I've also avoided using permanent change-of-address forms from the USPS (the data from that is used to, you guessed it, update marketing lists). Having dropped use of credit cards, I've had no credit report for years (occasionally a minor hassle, but actually somewhat nice), and what data does exist is a very jumbled scramble of mostly highly outdated addresses and locations. I prefer it that way.
>Skype: Contact customer services. You’ll need to know 5 contacts from your contacts list, the month you created your account, and your signup email address. Why do I get the feeling asking Skype to cancel your account immediately puts you into a special watchlist?
The challenge of electronic services is in identifying your customers. Especially when you're doing something allegedly on their behalf. Double-especially when that has permanent state/data loss consequences.
Quora gives me a link to "deactivate" my account but wants me to write a mail to privacy@quora.com for "deleting" my account. Others have reported that the requests sent to this email address are not fulfilled, neither are the mails even replied to. I want to know the names of assholes in charge of this company so that I can avoid ever working with them.
Quora gives me a link to "deactivate" my account but wants me to write a mail to privacy@quora.com for "deleting" my account. Others have reported that the requests sent to this email address are not fulfilled, neither are the mails even replied to. I want to know the names of assholes in charge of this company so that I can avoid ever working with them.
>Skype: Contact customer services. You’ll need to know 5 contacts from your contacts list, the month you created your account, and your signup email address. Why do I get the feeling asking Skype to cancel your account immediately puts you into a special watchlist?
Given the negative consequences (DoS) of an unauthorized account deactivation, this is actually a fairly reasonable protocol. The challenge of electronic services is in identifying your customers. Especially when you're doing something allegedly on their behalf. Double-especially when that has permanent state/data loss consequences.
I think it is unfair to expect people to save their original email confirmation mail for upwards to 10 years (skype was released in 2003), especially given that nowhere in the mail it says that this is really important to keep.
Why do people expect data about themselves to magically disappear from the Internet? One should always assume that everything you communicate online (explicitly or not) has the potential to exist forever.