How to break free of the world wide web

SOME adventures are fun. Others are hellish and dispiriting. As a rule, the adventures that ensue when you try to figure out how to delete your account from a Web service like Amazon or Spotify are not the fun kind. They’re the kind that make you want to book a flight to Seattle just so you can hurl your computer through Jeff Bezos’s window.

It was after marvelling at some fed- up users’ tweets about how incredibly difficult it is to delete a Skype account that a British developer named Robb Lewis decided to lend a hand. So he built a website that takes the adventure out of account deletion. It’s called “Just Delete Me” and it’s as simple as Skype’s account-deletion procedure is convoluted.

But the best part of Just Delete Me, in the long run, is the colourcoding. On justdelete.me, sites that offer easy account deletion are coded green, the moderately difficult ones are yellow, the hard ones are red, and the impossible ones are black. At a glance, the world can see how desperate some sites are to hang on to users’ data, even when it’s clear the user wants it back.

Here’s a sampling of major Web services whose account- deletion procedures Lewis rates as “hard” – in some cases because the “delete” button is buried in the site’s bowels, and in others because the only way to delete your account is to actually call up customer service and harangue them in person: Amazon, Digg, EA Origin, Etsy, Feedly, iTunes/Apple ID, Pandora, Shutterfly, Skype, Spotify and Vine.

And then there are the Web services Lewis rates as “impossible”. In some cases they will allow you to deactivate your account, but offer no way to delete your data. In others, you’re just plain out of luck. The sites Lewis rates “impossible”: Craigslist, Evernote, Wikipedia and WordPress. – Slate