Deleting membership

[ChrisJakarta]

Stimulated by several recent reports about login/password details being stolen from forums, I spent most of a weekend updating membership/passwords on what seems like hundreds of sites that I access, some frequently, others only occasionally, some no longer. This included a number of mail order sites.

Although most (though not all!) made it possible to change passwords, if sometimes making it difficult to find the link, very few seemed to offer the option of cancelling my membership and deleting membership details. As far as I can determine, this also applies to this forum (not that I want to! ). Is this a privacy service that should be offered? The Simple Machines (SMF) software that I use on my site does offer this option.

Am I being over-paranoid?

Chris

[Jay Freedman]

Am I being over-paranoid?

Probably. It depends largely on how you used your passwords in the past.

If you used a different password on every site you visited, you have nothing much to worry about. A bad actor who stole and used your password on one forum would have to do it all over again to get into your account on another forum, which is just too much work -- and the worst they could do is post while pretending to be you.

Where it gets worrisome is when (like a lot of people who use the Internet without thinking) one uses the same password on multiple forums, their work PC, their online banking site, their medical records, whatever. Of course, the hacker will try the same password with that user's other accounts, and bingo! (And lots of people use passwords like "password" or "12345", which just makes the hacker's job that much easier.)

[HansV]

As Jay says, there is no reason to worry if your forum passwords are different from those you use for online banking etc.

Most boards don't let members delete their membership details because forum threads are meant as a public service, not just for the benefit of the original poster. If a member could remove everything including their posts, existing threads would become incomprehensible. Even if their posts were left in place but their username was removed, it would make threads difficult to follow.