Watching a guy at the Portland library try to delete his old social media account and fail completely flipped my view on giving companies our info.

He spent over an hour on the phone with customer service, getting bounced around, and they finally told him the 'historical archive' of his posts and likes was 'integral to their service model' and couldn't be removed, which made me realize we never really own the digital trails we leave, we just rent space for them on corporate servers. Has anyone actually managed to fully scrub their old data from a big platform?

3 comments

3 Comments

smith.nancy3d ago

Honestly, that's just the trade-off for a free service. They use that old data to make the platform work better for everyone, like suggesting friends or filtering content. Getting hung up on total deletion misses the point of how these networks function.

phoenix_bailey2d ago

Consider how that old data could train a biased system against you later.

the_thomas2d ago

Remember that time I tried to delete an old email account from like 2008? The company said it was gone, but a year later some old contacts still had that address pop up as a suggested person to connect with. It makes you wonder what "deleted" really means on these platforms, if the data ghosts still float around to train their systems. That's the part that feels off, even if it helps the site run smoother.