Why You Need To Go Through Your Online Accounts – Technologist

When you think about cybersecurity, you may immediately think about your financial accounts, where protection is crucial. But money expert Clark Howard wants you to know that your old online accounts – yes, those unrelated to your financial life – are at risk as well.

“Our online presence can end up being the key that unlocks nothing but trouble for you and me, for your identity, our money, you name it,” Clark says.

 “Think about every one of those you leave behind, you’re leaving yourself vulnerable to a criminal trying to get into your life. And I’m not talking about banks, or credit unions, or brokerages, I’m talking about all the other stuff in our lives,” he says.

That’s why Clark wants you to safeguard your online identity by finding your old online accounts and deleting them.

Why You Need To Delete Your Old Online Account

“We will have an account that we haven’t used in forever but the account lives on, information is still out there for who knows what,” Clark says.

Also, the constant data breaches, which typically capture consumers’ names, addresses and even passwords, make it necessary to be increasingly vigilant about the information we have online. To mitigate our risk, we need to follow these two steps:

• Find Your Old Online Accounts
• Delete Your Old Accounts

How To Find Your Old Online Accounts

To find your old accounts, think about the websites you frequented many years ago. Some categories that you might start with are:

• Social media sites (Myspace, Friendster, Tumblr, etc.)
• Old employers
• Internet message boards
• Job boards
• Streaming services

On Google, I searched for defunct social media sites and a list came up (I didn’t have a profile on any of them), but you can do the same for any category you think of.

Screenshot via google.com

If you’re like me, you may have a few email accounts that continue to get mail from entities that you’ve signed up with. Go through all your emails and make a list of the companies and services there that you might be able to still access.

Delete Your Old Accounts

Now comes the hard part: remembering the password to an old account. 

“Being human, many of us are better about the password stuff, but for accounts that are older, man, we were repeating the same password over and over again,” Clark says. To avoid that now, Clark recommends using a password manager.

Again, the key to your account password, or at least your username, may be found in some of your older email addresses. As you go through them, you’ll see correspondence from some of these companies and that will tell you that that’s the email address you signed up with.

If you can’t come up with your passwords, you should be able to hit the “forgot password” button and the site will send you a code or link for online re-entry.

Once you access your old account and are able to get inside of it, find the appropriate way to delete your account. For many services, it may be under the “Settings” tab or it may say “Manage Your Account,” or something similar.

“I went through recently and found all these sites that I didn’t remember that I had even used,” Clark says. “I mean crazy stuff. It was a pain in the rear end, but I went through one by one and deleted my account with those providers.”

Final Thoughts

Clark says if you want to protect your online presence, find those old online accounts and delete them!

“The accounts we had with this retailer or that retailer or the other one, I closed them,” he says. “I closed those online accounts. I had one with Macy’s.” Clark says he doesn’t even remember the last time he shopped at Macy’s. He closed the account.

And for clarity, Clark is not talking about a Macy’s credit card account. He doesn’t do store credit cards because of the inhospitable fees. He’s talking about an online account. “I’m not picking on Macy’s,” he says, but his advice is to close down any online account that you no longer use.

Additionally, you might also use this time to detach yourself from some of the subscriptions that you’re paying for, but no longer use. Need help with that? Read our guide on How To Manage Your Subscriptions.

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