For some people, the novelty of social media has worn thin.  Facebook is constantly wanting more and more of your personal information, because that’s their biggest selling point to advertisers.  Twitter hashtags are displayed on just about any television show now, and YouTube videos are showing up virtually everywhere.  If you get to the point where you say, “That’s it, I’m done – no more social media” do you know how to go about cancelling those accounts?  I’ll show you a really easy way today.

Actually I shouldn’t say it’s definitely “easy” – it really depends on what account(s) you want to cancel.  Some sites make it a simple process, and other sites make it nearly impossible.

But thankfully, there is one website that can guide you through the process for cancelling almost ANY online accounts, social media or otherwise.  That site is AccountKiller.

Using AccountKiller is free, although they encourage you to make a donation if you find the site useful (and if you want to cancel some online accounts, it is definitely useful).

The site doesn’t actually cancel the account(s) for you.  It just tells you how to do it, and even provides a link to the actual cancellation page when there is one available.  There is also usually some handy advice or tips on how to go about cancelling, and what ramifications there might be for cancelling your account with that particular site.

For example, let’s say you want to cancel your Yahoo.com account.  AccountKiller gives you the exact URL for the cancellation page (https://edit.yahoo.com/config/delete_user).  They also tell you:

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• If you have publicly visible images posted, those aren’t always deleted even when you cancel your account successfully.  It’s a good idea to manually delete them before you cancel the account.
  
• Your Yahoo account is connected to your Flickr account, so if you cancel Yahoo, you also cancel Flickr.  But if you want, you can go and cancel your Flickr account separately without cancelling your Yahoo account.
  

There are details like that for hundreds of online accounts.  They have the various accounts categorized by color:

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• White – easy to cancel, sometimes with just a click or two
  
• Black – very difficult or impossible to cancel
  
• Gray – somewhere in between
  

If you have an account you want to cancel and you don’t see it listed there (which would be fairly unlikely), you can send it to them as a suggestion and they will research it and eventually post it along with the others.  Great resource.

http://www.accountkiller.com