Why You Should Delete Online Accounts You No Longer Use & How to Do It | Mechanics' Institute

You are here

Why You Should Delete Online Accounts You No Longer Use & How to Do It

I recently read an informative article entitled “How to Delete Online Accounts You No Longer Need” from the very reliable Consumer Reports. If you are like most people, over the years, you have created online accounts, many of which you no longer use. Recently, I received an email from Flickr notifying me of “Important updates to your Flickr account”. I had completely forgotten I had a Flickr account.  Unfortunately, I used an old yahoo.com email account to register for my Flickr account. I do not use the Yahoo account anymore and cannot remember the password. I also cannot authenticate my Yahoo email with an obsolete phone number on file at Yahoo to get a text recovery number. I tried via another current email for authentication, but the message never came through. I now have these two accounts floating around out there that I cannot close. That has spurred me on to do a more extensive inventory of my obsolete accounts and delete them, where possible.

With all the recent data breaches and revelations about privacy on popular websites, it is important to delete unused accounts. This article has links and instructions to specific sites, including Blogger and Google+, and additional articles on online privacy and security. How many obsolete accounts do you have?

Posted on Jan. 8, 2019 by Deborah Hunt