Hello, I wrote a mail template which I send to websites that don’t have an easy process of deleting an account.

Maybe it helps you, maybe you will use it too for when you want to delete your unused accounts and maybe you can contribute to it. The better the message gets and the more websites offer an easy way to delete accounts, the safer we’ll be online.

If you can influence the deletion policy, please read on. Otherwise, please forward this to someone that can influence this process.

It’s better for the business to offer an easy way to delete an account. Ideally, it would be good to delete accounts which weren’t active for more than say 5 years, with a mail notification beforehand. Why? Here are the main reasons:

• There are higher operation and maintenance costs because you have unused accounts in your databases.
• The services load slower, with a performance penalty, because each user-related query has to go through many unused users.
• The people opinion of your services decreases, because you don’t offer an easy way to delete accounts
• People might change their mail to a throw-away address and leave the account open, thus producing more waste than necessary.
• In case of a security breach, the amount of compromised data is higher than in case you regularly delete accounts, which might lead to financial penalties.
• The information you get out of a database with active accounts is much more precious than the information from a stale database, or one with obsolete data.

I hope this information helps and that you will change your policy of deleting accounts. Each website that does this, contributes to a better, safer ecosystem.