Please Forget Me

The previous entry about Rojo (and, in particular, Aristole’s comment) reminds me of big complaint that I have about pretty much all web sites – which is that they like to make it incredibly difficult to close your account with them.

Oh, I understand completely why that is. If you’ve registered with a web site then they have valuable information about you. And I can see why they’d be loathe to give that up. But wouldn’t it be great if every web site had a “forget about me” button which you could press and then all of your details would be removed from the site’s database. I realise that there are probably legal reasons why Amazon, for example, would need to keep records of all of your previous orders. But they have mountains of marketing data on you which isn’t at all necessary. I’d love to have the power to nuke all of that data. Wouldn’t you?

And it isn’t as though I’d want to press that button very often at all. It’s just that it would be good to know that you had that power should you want to wield it.

Some companies already do it. I can think of Backpack who not only have a “cancel my account” button, but also the facility to export all of your data before you do it. Of course, that’s data that you’ve originally stored there rather than marketing data that they’ve been hoarding by monitoring your surfing habits. But it’s a start?

How about a campaign to get a “forget about me” button added to web sites? Who’s with me?

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