Get MAD at Your Digital Debris
Last week, Jeff Atwood had a great post looking at how many social networking-based services try to jump-start your profiles by letting you add friends by tapping into e-mail accounts such as GMail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail.
At first blush, it seems like a good idea until you realize that you’re giving these sites access to your username and password that are closely associated with your online identity and personal/financial information.
It got me thinking about the hundreds of Web sites in which I’ve provided personal information to some degree over the past few years. As an enthusiastic beta user, I’ve happily provided e-mail, username and password data, and, from time to time, information about where I live and my Web sites/blogs.
Many of these sites I’ve visited a few times before moving on to something newer and better. All of which means there’s an awful of digital debris floating in cyberspace (kind of like all the space debris floating in orbit around Earth). If you’ve ever tried to clean up this debris by deleting online accounts, it’s either difficult to do or impossible. Look how difficult, for example, Facebook makes it for you to delete an account.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a Master Account Deletion service (aka MAD). Using MAD, you could provide the user name, password and e-mail address associated with many of the accounts that you’ve signed up to use. It would somehow scour the Web looking for this information, and then produce a list of all the sites that meet this criteria. Then, you could quickly and easily delete all the accounts you no longer want or use.
The process would be a lot more complex than what I’ve described, and there would have be some impressive security involved so you only got access to your accounts. As well, MAD would also need ultra-security procedures given they would have access to your user name, password and e-mail information.
If someone could create MAD, you have to think there would be healthy demand from people looking to digitally clean up after themselves rather than having personal information scattered across the Web.
Heck, there might be some people willing to pay for it.
Technorati Tags: Web 2.0
June 10th, 2008 at 10:36 am
It would be great but unfortunately we all know facebook and others aren’t actually deleting anything when you delete your account. They’re simply removing public access to your data.
I think the real solution would be some entity, BBB?, that allows these services to certify with. They can achieve some certificate that says “we truly delete your personal data when you ask us to”. Beyond some trust worthy, third party doing this, there’s no guarantees anything is really deleted. In fact it’s safe to assume just the opposite.
June 10th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Just when I think I’m being cautious enough, you catch me snoozing. I had resisted doing the email search for almost a year, then tried it a few weeks ago. I look forward to you letting us all know when MAD becomes reality.