Aside from writing for my Unsolicited But Offered blog and reading BBC, one of the more pleasurable activities I do online is closing a web service. My online footprint is fairly small (no social networking accounts unless you count Blogger), but I recently closed another subscription I hadn't touched for awhile - my sister blog over at Wordpress.com called Unplugged Asia. I realized that between writing Unsolicited and my day job, I couldn't maintain a human interest piece on Asia regularly.
As a rule, I generally research a web service before I sign up. I like having virtually no personal stuff online so I always want a way out so on average I try only one web service a year. The most popular online accounts, such as Yahoo! and Google Accounts, have easy to navigate help pages to help you find ways to log off permanently. Other services, such as LinkedIn, are a bit more difficult and obtuse.
Over the years, I've also closed accounts from Yahoo! Australia, Dropbox and AOL. I always back up all the archived content to one of my Linux servers or e-mail using Thunderbird or Evolution before severing all ties. Afterwards, I bask in the knowledge that part of my data is no longer available on public servers.
These days, I'm tempted daily to log off permanently from two other well-known web services: Yahoo! and LinkedIn. Although I still visit Yahoo!'s home page every now and then (yeah, yeah, I know), it's painful to log in to their e-mail. However, I've had the Yahoo! account since Yahoo!'s heyday and I keep it around for sentimental reasons (and a junk e-mail address is still somewhat useful these days). On the other hand, I was bamboozled into signing up for LinkedIn a few years back and find their service oppressive and only somewhat necessary for any professional. My fingers often get itchy and visit their help page often just to remind myself that I can wipe that account clean any time.
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