Some questions about account deletion - and an alternative

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Lode
Yellow-bellied Woodpecker
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Age: 30
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10 Mar 2014, 7:23 am

As many people know, it's impossible to delete your account on this forum.

In some occasions, this has undesirable consequences for the personal lives of some members.

It would help me - and I think many others - a lot if it was possible to change the name of the WP account. Is there any way this could be possible?

Another problem is the fact that you can find my profile by googling my (old) email adress. I changed the email adress in my profile settings 4 years ago, but googling the old one still makes this WP account show up on Google. Is this something that can be solved by WP admins or am I completely dependant on Google?

And what about posts? I really dislike the fact that you can see my posts if you click my profile after googling it. Is there no way to hide very old posts or to make it impossible for visitors to look at posts this way?



TallyMan
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10 Mar 2014, 7:39 am

Email addresses are not normally visible to Google or anyone else. For google to have picked it up you must have over overridden the default privacy setting and made your email address publicly visible at some time in the past. I've just checked and it is currently set to private. The only other way your email address gets exposed is if you include it one of your posts or signature line or reference it offsite - yourself linking it to this site.

Once personal information becomes public Google or other archiving sites may hang on to that cached information for many years.

Regarding your other suggestions, only Alex the site owner can implement such changes or changes to policy. The moderators only implement his policy.


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Cornflake
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10 Mar 2014, 9:26 am

Lode wrote:
Another problem is the fact that you can find my profile by googling my (old) email adress. I changed the email adress in my profile settings 4 years ago, but googling the old one still makes this WP account show up on Google. Is this something that can be solved by WP admins or am I completely dependant on Google?

And what about posts? I really dislike the fact that you can see my posts if you click my profile after googling it. Is there no way to hide very old posts or to make it impossible for visitors to look at posts this way?
Google is merely one easily accessible source of data - accessible both to people and other interconnected information gathering systems, which would also have their own independent access to WP by virtue of it being a publically-accessible system.
Once data has been made available on such a public network it becomes, to all intents and purposes, public property as regards the means and ease of dissemination. The genie is out of the bottle and there's no getting it back in...

The only way to regain control of data placed onto a public network would be to find every accessible instance and instigate legal proceedings against the parties responsible for retaining it, to have it removed - and I doubt that the difficulties and costs involved with this need explaining. This also addresses only the currently accessible instances: something like a worldwide injunction on publication would be required to address any subsequent reappearance - but such an action is unlikely to be achievable even by a major government.


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