Hunting down 50 old accounts I forgot existed

Last month I decided to really clean up my online footprint. I started with the easy stuff like old social media profiles, but then I got curious about all those random forums and services I signed up for years ago. I must have created accounts for like 4 different photo editing sites, 2 project management tools I never used, and even a dating app from 2016. The trick that actually worked was checking my password manager's history and also looking through my old email inbox for verification messages. I typed "activate your account" into Gmail search and found over 50 accounts I completely forgot about. Most of them I just deleted or deactivated, but a few had personal info still sitting there which felt kinda creepy. Did anyone else find old accounts they forgot about that had more data than expected?

2 comments

2 Comments

logan23615d agoMost Upvoted

Oh man, I gotta push back a little on that. Actually, lots of those old sites that didn't send verification emails are exactly the ones that are the biggest problem today. They just let you create an account with any email, no confirmation needed, so those accounts are still out there with no way to recover them or delete them now. I ran into that myself with a few old photo sharing sites from like 2012 where I couldn't even log in because the forgot password feature didn't work anymore. It's honestly kinda scary knowing those profiles are sitting there with my old username and maybe a profile picture and I have zero way to take them down. So the email search trick is good but it only catches the ones that actually emailed you back then, not all the ones that just silently created an account.

the_oscar16d ago

Gotta say, the email search trick is smart but it won't catch everything. Lots of sites back in the day didn't send verification emails at all, they just let you sign up and start using it right away. I found a few old forum accounts that way where my password manager had zero record of em.