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Comment by bryang | Hacker News Reader

Skype is one of my most hated programs.

And a reason for that is the utter absurdity in regards to account deletion. You have to do fairly standard things like identify email, password and some contacts.... but you also have to know the EXACT month and year of which you signed up. And unless you got lucky and didn't delete your sign up email up there is no possible way to find out. When I first signed up, I had a ridiculous name like everyone else did back in the day, and I wanted to just move on. Not very serious, I know, but this issue can be for many circumstances.

I really wish that some legislation would be passed for a "Nuke" button standard on all digital platforms that allows you or a designed individual to erase profiles at will.

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Why do companies do stupid things like that? Is it a technical issue or do they REALLY care that much about having your name on file even if you want to delete your account?

Maybe there's an argument for Facebook keeping your pictures in case you ever want to come back (even though I still believe they should delete them if you ask them to). But only your name? What possible use could they have for that?

There are probably business reasons for wanting the number of accounts to never go down, but I'll give you a technical reason: the database schema.

Most big companies will have a big database holding user data, with many tables that have cross-reference fields. There is one table with the master-record for each user account, and that record's unique key is cross-referenced in many other tables that hold data related to the account, and many of those cross-reference other user accounts as well.

To delete the master record, the database schema requires deletion of all of the cross-referenced records too. But when those are also referencing other users, you'd have to delete their master records too. You can't do that, so you're not able to delete anything.

This is a naive implementation, but it's common for databases designed without forethought about record deletion. The typical solution is to add an 'active' flag field, and to do 'soft-deletes' which just sets the flag to false. The record isn't deleted, so there is no problem with references. However, now ALL of your queries need to include 'where active=true' to make sure soft-deleted records don't get displayed. That can be a huge retro-fit if you didn't plan for it from the start, and it requires extra care even if you did. Which is why it's often not done.

> And unless you got lucky and didn't delete your sign up email there is no possible way to find out.

What, do people really delete read email?

Before GMail a typical webmail provider gave you so little space that deleting irrelevant e-mails was standard practice; otherwise your inbox would soon fill up.

Frankly, I had to delete my e-mails on school Linux server AND not so long ago, on company mailbox. Yes, this is ridiculous and yes, it happens.

I use a 503(c) service for email, the only thing is that they rely on dontations, so the more space I use the more it'll cost them. So out of being curteous to them, I delete any unwanted email. One other reason I delete email is because I like having a 'clean' inbox.

But despite all of that, it's really Skype's fault for assuming that a user will keep randomly chosen, arbitrary data like that. Not all of us have photographic memories, so the vast userbase, as a result, will have great difficulty in deleting their account. There's also a very high probability that it's done by Skype deliberately, to stop people deleting their accounts (Because data mining is 'phun'!)

If you give that 503(c) $10, that will cover email storage forever.

Yes.

I have zero reason to keep a Skype welcome email. I hate clutter - even digital clutter.

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