Over the last ten years I have probably joined hundreds of sites. Recently I have been cleaning up all these useless sites and trying to unsubscribe or delete my account and to my shock and surprise a large percentage won’t let me opt out or they hide opt out information hoping we will just give up. In many cases I have contacted customer service and requested them to deleted me, sometimes with ease, others have said they deleted me and I was able to log back in with no success and others won’t even answer my email requests so I was forced to take all my info down and place a dummy email in the email field and just log out.
I have came to the conclusion the reason why some of these sites won’t let us leave is simple, they have shareholders and investors and if they show a decline in users they won’t look to attractive to invest in right? The sites we talking about are not fly by night sites they are huge company’s sites, they are sites we are told to trust on the internet with elaborate privacy policy’s etc.
The digital boom was a good thing for many reasons, but to be honest I really don’t need to be signed up to hundreds of sites. Modern search engines provide lots of resources and tools leading us to free options or information with no sign up necessary. Passwords and usernames are like a digital key chain and I’m sick of mine being so bulky. The worst is if you don’t know your log in anymore or forgot the site you registered for. Being spread across the internet with so much private data everywhere is a disaster.
In the future I foresee sites that allow us to browse and not register directly and already we see that with sites that allow us to log in with Facebook or Twitter. What’s needed is a master finger print site, and with that site you can log into every other site and it verifies your age, location etc., this would make the internet safe and it would have less data spread everywhere. Some features could include a list of registered sites making it easy to erase sites you no longer use anymore.
Photo Credit: Ervins Strauhmanis
