2023-08-14

Digital Detox 2

tags: life

Another round of removing online accounts.

Due to some completely unforseen wiggle in the delicate fabric of space time it occured to me that I could get rid of three more accounts since I last wrote about it.

/en/2022/20220320-detox.gmi

Well, maybe the wiggle was not so unforseen after all. I am in the process of moving my email presence to another service provider. So I had to update my email on a number of online sites. Today I deleted three of them.

github.com

I had written, that this one could go "soonish", and now it was soonish enough. It is nice to note that a few clicks on the website got me there.

stayfriends.de

School time friends and aquaintances dwell there. Of course the owner of the site tries to make everyone increase the details of the social graph. But whose business is it to know, whether I had a girl friend there or not? No one's, of course. In all these years, I received maybe two meaningful messages asking for contact. And I offered them a better email address of mine --- faithfully mined by all the data miners along the way. So this account was useful, but not very much so. Again, a few clicks on the website got me all the way to cancellation of the paid account and deletion of the profile.

openBC.de aka xing.com

I don't remember, when exactly I joined this network. It might have been around the year 2000, and it was still named openBC by then. Xing is a "social network" of sorts. I had a profile there, I did get contact requests and job offers. I even did get my current job via Xing --- so one could call the whole thing a success story, right? I kept details to a minimum, I deleted entries from my list of contacts several times. I did pay for a premium account. So the site was useful to some extent. But I never really participated in anything going on there, not even discussions or "events".

And by now, my job life is nearing its end rather than the next exciting position with demanding challenges. So, why keep it? I could cancel the premium thing online. But I had to request a service ticket to get the whole thing deleted. With a bit of luck it should be gone in a few days.

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Of course, all this "deleted" data will continue to exist, flagged as invisible or in backups. Bye, bye accounts, may the goddesses of bit-ly nirvana be merciful.

Cheers,

~ew

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