Have you finished the process of accounts deletion or data removal? How long did it take?
Was it tiresome going through every “data protection officer” mail of companies while requesting for data removal?
How have you monitored the progress and checked if they removed your data?
Are you strict with new account creations nowadays?
I went through some old accounts when I migrated from KeePass to Vaultwarden. From start to finish, it roughly took five weeks for all ~25 inquiries to be completed. I check on my accounts every few moons.
Giving a ballpark estimate, 30% of services offer a (semi-) automated delete function in the account setting, 60% comply to emails within a few days and 10% are absolute pains.
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One of those 10% is Twilio (This expressly doesn’t apply if you only use Authy, their 2FA service). They don’t have an automated delete possibility, which is already a huge ick for a company of their size. But it got infinitely worse.
THEY DON’T LET YOU CREATE TICKETS WHEN YOU’RE A FREE CUSTOMER AND FORCE YOU TO USE THEIR AI BOT WHICH CAN’T DO SHIT AND WILL HALLUCINATE A WAY TO DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT BY YOURSELF. Their FAQs have conflicting information which some showing options that don’t even exist (anymore). And you have to dig through a lot of policy pages to even find an email address to contact that THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO CONTACT BECAUSE THEY “cannot delete data on your behalf because we cannot authenticate your request by email” (quote of one of their FAQ pages).
When I finally found an email address (that was for reporting data of minors being processed, but I didn’t care at that point) and pointed out to them that this is likely illegal, it was processed like a normal ticket and my account got deleted within a few days. I wonder why their legal department followed up a few days after that, apologizing for my “experience” and telling me that they would “review their processes”?
Anyway, that is that. If you want to use SendGrid or any other Twilio service except for Authy, save yourself the pain and just email [email protected] instead of trying to follow their processes which even they themselves don’t seem to know.
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So far, every account I deleted, I couldn’t log into after deletion. I can’t really check if they deleted the rest without breaking into their data centers.
And I’m not very strict with creating accounts nowadays but I’m much stricter with documenting them to my password manager now so I know that they exist. If I don’t need them anymore, they’ll get caught in the next rotation.
Is there a typical process you used to request deletion when there is no obvious way?
I am in the US and my state does not have rules that require it anyway so I am not certain if I can make them do it anyway?
What brings this up for me is I am changing my email address. Some places do not even offer that. Plus good time to clean up.
Usually I just send an email template asking them to delete my data per the GDPR (I’m an EU citizen). I’m not sure if you can force them to delete anything if they don’t have to by law, but I guess asking is free.
