Students Create Site For Deleting Old Accounts
13 September 2013, 07:20 | Updated: 30 March 2016, 13:50
A pair of University of Portsmouth students frustrated at the difficulty of deleting internet accounts have created a one-stop website to make it easier.
Web technologies students Robb Lewis and Ed Poole designed the website justdelete.me after they found it difficult to delete an account with the web phone service Skype.
Now their new service allows web users to remove unwanted accounts without having to navigate through confusing menus and settings.
And within a week of being launched it had already been visited by more than 500,000 people from more than 150 countries.
Robb said:
"After seeing a few tweets about how difficult it can be to delete your Skype account and then hearing that Netflix won't delete your details at all, we decided to build justdelete.me as a one-stop shop for people like me who get annoyed with the hoops you have to jump through to delete certain internet accounts.
"I think in the wake of the NSA and GCHQ scandals, people are far more aware of what data they are sharing, and leaving, on web services.
"By deleting old or unused accounts users can stop spam emails, reduce the amount of apps that have access to data and generally feel safe in the knowledge that they know what is online about them.''
The site gives a directory of URL links to delete your account from over 200 different web services, including Facebook, Amazon, eBay, LinkedIn and MySpace.
Services are marked either 'easy', 'medium', 'hard' or 'impossible' depending on how difficult it is to delete the account and those marked 'hard' include additional information on how to completely remove your account.
