‘removed from public access, but retained for our own or for legal purposes’
Your data has been “deleted”.
That takes me back. Been several years for me. Congratulations
Thanks, and nice going!
Congratulations. I have mine still active for 2 years for email forwarding…I think I should have caught all residual services by now and switched the email adress for them. Photos are transferred to selfhosted Immich, Files on nextcloud and Filen. Maybe I should find some time for the final deletion then?
Congratulations. Starting this year i got rid of facebook account but not completely because messenger is probably most popular messaging app in my country for some reason but still it is a great feeling
I’ve done the same. Removing messenger is impossible in Poland
That’s gotta be infuriating.
That’s something to do while we still can, Instagram doesn’t let me delete my own account :/ Tried reaching the support multiple times, I’ve been completely ignored
i used an instagram scraper tool with an account, at some point they suspended the account and required my ID. I obviously refused and just let it rot, at some point they deleted my account.
After how much time? I was banned because of using third party client, I did the kyc process at the time because I wanted to delete the account but still I could not access…
It’s been years for me and they didn’t delete it yet.
You might get better results by going outside their channels and using legal options. Like not through the courts, but I think some jurisdictions have a law that you data must be deleted if a request is sent in writing or something like that. You might also be able to request they send you all the data they have (though this might cost money because they print it and mail it). I remember someone did that with their Tinder data for some article about how shitty Tinder is, though it depends on where you live.
I used instaloader to scrape about 5 profiles (my friends, ofc i have their permission) every day (was it called story? the 24h expiring thing). occasionally the token(?) saved in instaloader would expire and display their warning saying there was “Suspicious activity” or something, so i setup a simple script to run firefox to login and extract cookies from it every time. Had that running for some weeks and it was permabanned
Congratulations!!!
I’m getting closer and closer to this goal myself.
Good luck! I just decided to rip the bandage off instead of going through my accounts. I’ve been self-hosting for several years now, and I have replacements for all Google apps. The only thing I’d been using it for was YouTube, but that site is definitely compromising for people with certain political opinions.
This would be me if only there was some way to easily determine where I have used my @gmail address in the past 20 years. I have already set up another address that I own myself and have moved a bunch of stuff over, but I don’t want to lose access to the rest of my accounts tied to my Gmail address.
Although I suppose I could go through my Keepass and list all logins that use my gmail, then chip away at that…
You can setup a rule in Gmail, and tag them when they get to your new inbox. Use Gmail to add a junk CC, or something if the new provider doesn’t have strong automation capabilities.
Then use the tags to go back and change the email on file (if necessary).
After a year if they haven’t contacted you then they obviously aren’t that important.
I found a lot of emails but I didn’t find a lot of emails I cared about enough to update when I did this.
This is a great idea.
I’m using Thunderbird with IMAP to my own email server for my new email, but I can totally see something like that working to make the transition work. Thanks!
That’s a smart way of going about it. I threw caution to the wind because I stopped using my Google account for services years ago. We’ll see how that affects things in the future.
I see it as fate. I switched credit cards and wanted to register my new one on Meta but their system would not let me enter a Canadian postal code. My solution is to let the account expire in April (due to non-account payment because the credit card on file no longer exists) and sell my Quest 3s, otherwise they would have had me for another year. My days of troubleshooting or trying to get around bad design are over. Life is too short and VR, while fun, isn’t fun enough for me to make the time sacrifices required to keep going. The bloom is off of the VR rose.
deleted by creator
I’d suggest to recover your account and burn it first: Register in a hell amount of random services for a few weeks to make it confuse about you, so their data about you will be imprecise which has no much value for them.
BUT… don’t be too obvious, make it look like a legit behavior. We must assume they can spot a timestamp when you started burning it.
I say that because I did the same, straight deleted my Google account, but I wish I realized it’d be better to burn it first.
Anyway, not a mandatory thing, your data will become useless eventually, up to date data is more valuable for them than outdated data. They probably just ignore/delete old deleted accounts indeed, since it has each time less updated info.
Obligatory joke that feels too real:
The fact that it’s on YouTube enhances the joke, I feel
I had to install a redirect add-on while I held my breath.
All for-profit prisons already have these features, lol.
If it was deleted then how could you recover it
It gets deleted after some time. There is some time to recover it before it will be deleted actually.
So they’re lying
My children’s schools and after-school extracurricular clubs (including ones offered by the local police department) still are held hostage by Alphabet, forcing me to also maintain an account with them. But… I don’t need to use it for anything else.
I don’t know how it works for Google but the moment they invoiced you once they might be able to or more precisely they might have to nevertheless keep yr data for years for tax reasons… And then some because they might have to comply with obscure data retention laws or such. But as of the moment this deletion happens you might not be able to access it anymore indeed.
I would never dare to do that, sadly. My job keeps me from attempting such a risky maneuver.
Have you considered slowly transitioning to another account/service?
I’ve been going through my google account for almost a year now, taking my time to really deal with all that stuff so I can close it for good.
I have Kubuntu on a VM. I feel like I need to buy another device right now, just to pull it off. It takes me basically all day to do one hour of work, because idk why…I’m totally fucked. So I’m afraid of messing up the transition.
I’m already used to the sudo, apt, and npm package nonsense that everyone has to deal with.
I already accepted that it will always be broken, there will always be more workarounds, and one type might fuck up my entire OS (happened already).
EDIT: I did delete Paypal.
I hear ya, getting into it can be messy. And having a VM on the side is a good choice.
My current idea of a solid setup to manage long term:
*A main machine that has a bare-bones, lightweight Distro on it. Just the stuff you need to work + a VM program to run:
VM1: a copy of your main OS, test stuff out here first if you think it’s risky.
VM2: big tech corp spy software IF you need it. (Keep that sucker offline)
(And make backups/snapshots of your installation every once in a while).
If you have it: second machine: this one is for degoogling ect, save your social media stuff here before you take it out back.
If you have it: 3rd machine to run as a personal server (working on that myself)
This can all be old gear. In the process of getting to know Linux better and better (which is an ongoing process for all of us) you’ll get more and more fluent.
You got this! Don’t give up!
