This post follows on from some previous social networking articles that form a small project looking at data security and the small print of social networking websites.

I’ve forgotten my password

During my investigation of these sites, I found that if you forget your password, two of the eight sites will send it in an email to you; a further four will email you a link to reset your password, but without asking for any identify verification, indicating that if your email account is compromised, a myriad of sites that you use could also be. Only two sites, Flickr and Windows Live Spaces, ask for personally identifiable information to reset your password.

I want to close my account

After you’ve gone to the trouble of setting up an account on these sites and having let your friends know about all the fun you’re having on them, let’s say that you decide that actually it may not be a great idea to have lots of your personal information floating about online and want to delete your accounts. It should be simple to eradicate yourself from them, right? Er, no not quite. In fact, I couldn’t completely erase my account from six of the eight that I’d signed up to. I emailed all of those who didn’t clarify whether my account would be permanently deleted from their databases and although some replied, I was largely ignored. Bebo and Friends Reunited were the only sites to confirm that my details would be permanently deleted from their databases after closing my account. If your MySpace account went way back and you decided to close it, the best thing to do would be to overwrite all details and every entry with useless details.

The sites use fancy words and carefully constructed sentences to skirt around the fact that they’ll keep at least some of your details on their records. For instance, if you close your Windows Live Spaces account, Microsoft states: “Closing your account will permanently delete your registered information (This is information given to Windows Live, including your e-mail address and password.) and credentials”, which sounds promising, until you read further down the document to the part that says, “Some of your information will not be deleted. To learn more about this see Microsoft Online Privacy Notice”, however, when you go to the privacy notice, it tells you only about the general privacy policy, with no specific mention of any of the information that may be retained about you. I emailed Microsoft to ask what this information includes, but interestingly received a reply that said they couldn’t help me with my enquiry. Hmm. Facebook talks of ‘deactivating’ accounts rather than deleting them and after emailing LinkedIn to ask to have my account removed, I received no response to confirm my request.

After having taken the time to close down these accounts, I was pretty curious to find out what information these sites still held about me, so I asked them. I emailed them all and only Bebo replied to tell me that after 7 days my profile will be deleted; they keep it for 7 days in case I’ve accidentally deleted it, which I hadn’t, so I hope that by now I don’t exist in their database anymore. The rest of them obviously don’t think that it’s an important point and completely ignored my enquiry.

Coming soon … what I learnt from the project