September 24, 2016
How the Yahoo hack freed me from its shackles
It has been a glorious morning of liberation, all started by a massive hacking of Yahoo accounts that came to light last week.
In 2014, information was stolen from 500 million Yahoo accounts. I’d say that’s pretty much all of them, so it was safe to assume my account was among the compromised.
In the past my reaction to this kind of news has been to change my password and hope for the best. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I seldom use this account, so why not just get rid of it?
It took about half an hour of battling with Yahoo, but I was finally victorious. At one point I had to change my password. They declared “bastard” to be too weak and wouldn’t accept it. So the victory wasn’t quite as satisfying as I had hoped.
Also, I was informed that while my account was deactivated, it would take 90 days for it to be actually deleted.
“This delay is necessary to discourage users from engaging in fraudulent activity.”
Not only that, but “information may possibly remain in our archived records after your account has been deleted.”
A class action lawsuit started in the U.S. accuses Yahoo of gross negligence over the hacking. Too bad there isn’t one in Canada as well.
In any case, emboldened by new-found freedom from Yahoo, I moved on to Instagram.
I have posted a grand total of five pictures to Instagram. I kept one of Justin Trudeau that I took when he campaigning for leadership of the Liberal party in Kamloops. The rest are no loss.
To Instagram’s credit, deleting this account took only a few seconds.
Then I moved on to LinkedIn. I don’t want to say anything bad about this network, because I believe there are members who genuinely try to help each other. I would be surprised, though, if it ever did anything other than waste my time.
Deleting this account was easy, but I first had to run a gauntlet of guilt. They showed pictures of some of my connections, and pictures of some of the people who had endorsed me. And it did indeed make me feel a little guilty. I would sincerely like to thank everyone who ever endorsed me.
But the guilt soon passed. When I saw the screen that said, “We’ve closed your account,” I pumped my fist in the air.
Now if I could only summon the courage to delete Facebook . . .