loudwhisper

That's your choice. It's a completely different thing.

In fact, we generally consider toxic communities where there is a harsh form of gatekeeping (which in your example would be same result, but the result of the community's choice, not yours).

To be fair the vast, vast majority of the rules are simply common sense stuff. If you are not an asshole, you can avoid reading community rules and in 99% of case you won't violate any.

Thanks. Absolutely my experience too. The ones where you can't edit the email I noticed often used the email as username, and probably god knows how bad is the code on the backend.

Hey, I haven't, but to be honest, the answers I got from most companies showed me that the processes were handled by people who barely understood the legal and technical aspects around data collection (e.g., often support agents were on the other side of privacy@), which means I wouldn't trust them with their answer anyway AND I doubt many of these companies will have effective way to even check that.

From the data being sold point of view, I think unfortunately it's way more effective reaching out to the few big data brokers to request cancelations or pay one of the companies who offer such service...

Thank you for sharing. I have become weirdly fascinated with the weird or horrific processes to delete your data, so I am very interesting in hearing other people similar experiences!

Thanks for the kind words!

I won't take credits for the template, I have used the one found here: https://www.datarequests.org/blog/sample-letter-gdpr-erasure-request/

Eh, the thing is I made the formal request using data deletion module, but I just assumed that's what the support person asked the development person ("team"), assuming it was not the same person for both!

Congratulations on completing this!

I have indeed moved most accounts to individual aliases. I used to use the same username and similar emails (perhaps grouped like shops@mydomain), but I got no benefit and the username allowed unnecessary correlations.

So alias + random username and I will have much much less trouble in the future. Hopefully!

You are right and what some people miss is that social engineering being the vector to gain foothold doesn't mean that it was sufficient to allow the breach. Almost always you need some other weakness (or a series of them). Except when the weaknesses are so had that you don't need a foothold at all (like this case), or when the social engineering gives you everything (rare, but you might convince you someone to give you access to data etc.).

A whole separate conversation is deserved by how effective (or not) social engineering training is. Quite a few good papers about the topic came out in the last fee years.

Social/Political problems need social/political solutions, not technical solutions.

BUT! Do a thorough quality and content check (i.e. no rape, kiddy diddling, spousal abuse, any other type of abuse, etc.)

Genuine question, why? It seems just that you want your arbitrary moral rules instead of Visa's or MasterCard's (or PayPal's).

This also takes away agency from people. In fact, I am sure that there would be a way to diagnose every single relationship ever as a form of abuse in which someone takes advantage of someone else's something.

Adults are responsible for their choices, and particularly in the case of "assholes", that is often associated with being assertive, dismissive and some people just like that kind of "I am the main character" features. Maybe there are even some deep rooted evolutionary reasons for that, I don't know. Anyway, painting anything as victim-oppressor dichotomy IMHO is nonsense.