Complaint: account recovery, and the privacy of your digital footprint
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Sensitive or unwanted personal information on old accounts is an issue, and it will only grow as an important issue as the years roll by.
Re recent thread
https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/who-adjudicates-account-recoveryI am surprised by the systemic failure here. There are staff guidelines and edicts, and I value and respect that. People have their remits and a job to do. However there was no operational willingness or flexibility to find a solution together away from the forum where many account details can’t be shared, nor was I directed to a supervisor or department who can weigh information on a case by case basis.
I do not consider the staff member at fault, but I would like to propose that there is a deeper issue here that can be minuted for consideration in the development of future procedures. I regard the procedure as obviously lacking, as 2 minutes on Google threw up many recent similar cases, where users have old information in the public domain that they are seeking to update or expunge.
Account recovery requires proof of a monetary transaction id, an email activation key, or two factor authentication. In reverse order I experienced the following issues:
Two factor authentication was announced on April 5th 2013. Methods need to be considered for handling accounts that have been inactive since before that time (2011 in my case) as this is an invalid proof in such cases.
Activation keys may well be inaccessible given the pre-2013 condition suggested above, compounding the problem rather than solving it, if you didn’t have the same email address 6 years ago.
(In my case mail.com/1&1 sold off their @london.com property in 2011, leaving me high and dry, and wordpress was one of several things I didn’t think to update in time, but there can be many valid reasons for not having access to the original account email)
Transaction id is particularly perverse. Understood an understandable, it is a unique record that you can verify, but for many users wordpress.com is specifically sought and chosen for being free. It would be maladaptive to penalise and not seek to serve those users who came to wordpress.com because it was free and open.
For clarity and disclosure, I did by luck enter the old password and I have access to my old account now. That case is closed, but the issue of procedure stands for all other cases, writ large.
I would like to suggest that methods can be explored for using social media as evidence. By all means propose better initiatives, but something more needs to be available in your staff’s playbook.
Had I not got lucky with password attempts, I would have had to start a thread saying: “This page links to my LinkedIn page, and it is not me. It is therefore fraudulent, please take it down”. Presumably there are procedures to verify that sort of claim before action is taken to take down a page. Those same procedures could logically facilitate pre-2013 account recovery issues, or any similar loss of access to the original account’s email.
I hope that this post can encourage conversation, both here and in the back rooms of wordpress.com. I got lucky, I solved my own problem, and I have no personal interest in recrimination. I am interested in the broader issues of privacy, our digital footprints, and the services through which we express ourselves.
Warm regards,
Gareth W -
I am having a problem getting rid of a blog I made in 2011 for this exact reason. I’ve been trying for weeks, and have tried in vain to talk to a real human being about what I can do. The information on the blog I want deleted puts my safety at risk.
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@dorothyofodd
Please go to https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/private-info-is-public-on-an-old-blog-i-made-as-a-kid?replies=3#post-2996661 and post there only. -
@gwonline
To make suggestions to Staff we use the Ideas Forum https://en.forums.wordpress.com/forum/ideas Staff review all suggestions made there and if they choose to implement changes they contact those making the request at the email address found here https://wordpress.com/me/account
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