Until recently, you needed to establish an account to make an appointment for a COVID-19 vaccine online, a process that asks you to give Walgreens your name, home address, phone number, and more. You can shop the Walgreens website as a guest, but a Walgreens account is needed to earn rewards points. The health information a pharmacy collects can be particularly sensitive. Each process was challenging in a different way-but every time, I found some tricks that helped.
#Business closed deactivate delete yelp account manual#
It’s an entirely manual process.”įor each company below, I created a new account, then set out to time how long it took to delete it and any data the company had collected about me. “Your data isn’t just sitting in a spreadsheet, it can be spread across many different systems, including some which can be designed so deleting information is almost impossible. The problem can also be due to operational complexity, especially at bigger companies. “There are substantial hurdles-cost, technical skill, legal issues” that companies face when it comes to account deletion, she says. However, the challenges consumers face “may not be nefarious,” says Miriam Wugmeister, a lawyer who’s advised hundreds of companies as co-chair of the privacy and data group at the international law firm Morrison & Foerster. (Colorado and Virginia residents will have similar rights starting in 2023.) California’s privacy law mandates that most medium and large businesses let you delete your personal information, for example, but we’ve found that exercising that right can be a challenge. “Unfortunately, many companies seem to make this process deliberately hard to manage,” Brookman says. “Companies have a moral obligation to let you delete your accounts and your data, and in a few states they have-or soon will have-a legal obligation,” says Justin Brookman, director of privacy and technology policy at Consumer Reports. In some cases, finding any information at all about deleting an account entails a frustrating scavenger hunt through a website or an app. It wasn’t a methodical survey, and the companies I looked at might not be the worst offenders. In fact, one reason I chose these companies is that the difficulties I ran into seem to be fairly typical-complicated menus, a lack of clarity about whether deleting your account also deletes your data, and situations where you have to get on the phone, wait on hold, and eventually ask a customer service agent who may try to talk you out of it.
I also added a couple of websites I’ve seen people complaining about online. I timed how long it took to create and then delete accounts with a number of well-known brands where I or people I know have had difficulty in the past. My experiences were very different when I moved on to some other services. Then, just 34 seconds and nine easy clicks of the mouse later, I deleted that account and all the data Google had collected during its short but eventful life. So I set a timer and created a new Google account as fast as I could. To establish a rough benchmark for how long it should take to delete an account, I decided to use Google-an obvious example of a consumer-data-gathering mega-corporation, but also one that makes this process relatively easy. (You can jump right to my tips for cleaning out accounts.) Recently, I did a little experiment to uncover some of the most common inconveniences in the way account and data deletion requests are set up, and to provide some guidance on navigating the most convoluted processes. But deleting an account can be much more time-consuming. Signing up for an account often takes less than a minute, and the link to get started is usually at the top of a website’s home page. One thing that often comes up is how hard it can be to do. I’ve written about this issue for years, and had conversations with colleagues, friends, security experts, and CR readers about why it’s smart to periodically delete accounts and the data found in them.
0 kommentar(er)
