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Comment by willis936 | Hacker News Reader

After losing control of my Yahoo email after trying to delete it, I have learned that it’s not smart to give up control of something that has your identity.

I never use facebook, but I will never delete it. I don’t trust facebook.

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Giving up emails or phone numbers can be risky since someone else might take it and do something unpleasant with it.

Facebook accounts cannot be taken that way.

When I was younger, a friend created a Facebook account in my name as a joke. My facebook-using parents found it and became very panicked that someone was stealing my identity.

I now have a minimal facebook account that I log in twice a year to keep a current photo. It's like how businesses have to squat their own domain names on TLDs they don't use.

I didn’t think of that. It’s a good point, thanks for sharing.

Some years ago my daughter set up a fake account with my name and friended a bunch of people from my old high school. When I found out I changed the password and have ignored it since.

I now have a real account just for my gaming group and my old account occasionally pops up in my suggested friends list.

I'm curious if you could go more into the unpleasantness someone could do with an abandoned phone number. I inherited my mom's phone number years ago and recently had to dump it when I swapped my data plan. It honestly feels like the best thing that ever happened to me b/c I used to get daily spam calls and since getting the new number have gotten maybe 1 spam call total in the past two years, so had planned to change my number more frequently going forward.

Account takeover for services where you registered the phone number for verification.

In case anyone doesn't want to give up a number, but doesn't necessarily need it, you can also park the phone number at a VOIP provider for about $1/month.

Or google voice for a one time fee of $25 if you trust google (and you could still use it through google voice)

Once you release your id back into the pool, a criminal can commandeer it to attack your other accounts . It could be used for phishing through your network or resetting your other accounts

Keep the account . If you are worried about discipline , reset the password to a random password and lock it in a safe

Haha how did I get downvoted on this sound advice ?

That’s a terribly generalized advice. At least in the EU companies are obliged to delete your data (I don’t know about the US). Of course whether they delete it is another matter but that would be a violation of GDPR.

At the end of the day it boils down to trust. It’s general because companies are not trustworthy in general.

Interesting point. Better to have a 'real' facebook than some imposter pretending to be you.

In some ways for a business, not having a facebook is like not having a URL.

But if you don't have a FB account, how will customs ever let you into whatever country you are trying to enter?

You are tacitly voting that Facebook should be viewed as an arbiter of identity by taking this point of view.

When society views Facebook as part of your identity you're forced to also keep it. It's not always possible for individuals to reject it.

You end up with this self-feeding cycle of people keeping facebook around because they have to. Eventually what ends up happening is an alternative comes along and people essentially forget about the platform that it just shuts down and collapses on itself. We're slowly inching towards that final outcome.

Hard disagree. Facebook only has legitimacy if you personally agree it does. The minute you walk away, it loses all legitimacy. Same for LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. etc. There is no sense in which society at large using the product creates any degree of legitimacy for important functions like identity management. Precisely zero.

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