Tonight I had a friend tell me, “Just deleted my Twitter account, feels good.” I asked why, she responded that she didn’t need it anymore.” Sound theory, but I’d like to offer a little counter advice, the same advice I gave her.
Never delete your social network accounts. In an age where digital fraud is common, and social engineering is the #1 form of hacking, deleting a social network is at best a way to give someone a free pass to impersonate you and at worst giving someone a ticket to try to attack all of your friends.
See, the thing is, when you delete your account, after a period of time, that username will be opened up again, someone can register that and then use it pretending to be you. Anyone from a crazy ex-boyfriend or wife to a Nigerian scam artist.
So what do to instead? Easy, if you can just blank out all of the personal identifying information (PII) on the account and leave it active. If you didn’t care enough to delete it, you shouldn’t care if it’s still out there and full of junk info.
If the site won’t allow you to empty it, just fill it with crap. Create a junk email address, change your primary to that, and fill it with made up information. Make up a name, etc.
The nice side effect is that if you ever decide you want that account back, you can just start using it again. No harm!
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Very well said. Bad people may use our username and can do the things in wrong way. Thanks for realizing.
This was really interesting to know, i have a couple of accounts that that i dont use but would not want to delete them now…
Yeah I agree, hackers really don’t choose anything which one is to hack or not. They might pick you as flavor of the day play with your account and any info you have. The best thing for me, is to delete all information before deactivating any accounts else is to follow the author’s advice, just leave it for sometime, as you might need that account in the future.
I always find old, established account that are inactive. So if you have an account now on a big social network and leave it there for 10 years maybe you will have some perks for being such an old member or even better what if you register yourself to an anonymous social network and after 10 years it becomes a media giant… you can only win, so dont delete your accounts!
its your choice if you make your profile private or not
Excellent advice.
Good tip. I hadn’t thought about blanking out the information, I usually just keep it to a minimum. For people who need to be found online, for example freelancers or business people, having your “personal brand” on as many networks as possible, keeps you high up on the search ranks…although in my case, I’m not big enough for people to care lol.
I also agree. Better inactive than suffer identity theft.
I do not quite agree with you. It is extremely hard to keep the info at most Social Networks at minimum, you will at least need to fill some info with crap if you want to hide it. Your friends will contact you there and you will add them “as friends” and communicate with them – otherwise they may be offended by your ignoring. You may need to add at least one genuine photo as well. This gives scam artists plenty of information even if your passwords are secure and can not be bruteforced and any security breach and data leakage from the database will be impossible.
People are not that careful and may not notice the difference if one of the letters of “your” name will be different and especially if your impersonator will have your photos in his profile… Right now I am experiencing huge difficulties trying to delete my profile from one of the social networks and I think that I am right in doing so.
oh The nice side effect is that if you ever decide you want that account back