‘removed from public access, but retained for our own or for legal purposes’

Your data has been “deleted”.

Congratulations. I have mine still active for 2 years for email forwarding…I think I should have caught all residual services by now and switched the email adress for them. Photos are transferred to selfhosted Immich, Files on nextcloud and Filen. Maybe I should find some time for the final deletion then?

I see it as fate. I switched credit cards and wanted to register my new one on Meta but their system would not let me enter a Canadian postal code. My solution is to let the account expire in April (due to non-account payment because the credit card on file no longer exists) and sell my Quest 3s, otherwise they would have had me for another year. My days of troubleshooting or trying to get around bad design are over. Life is too short and VR, while fun, isn’t fun enough for me to make the time sacrifices required to keep going. The bloom is off of the VR rose.

Congratulations. Starting this year i got rid of facebook account but not completely because messenger is probably most popular messaging app in my country for some reason but still it is a great feeling

I don’t know how it works for Google but the moment they invoiced you once they might be able to or more precisely they might have to nevertheless keep yr data for years for tax reasons… And then some because they might have to comply with obscure data retention laws or such. But as of the moment this deletion happens you might not be able to access it anymore indeed.

My children’s schools and after-school extracurricular clubs (including ones offered by the local police department) still are held hostage by Alphabet, forcing me to also maintain an account with them. But… I don’t need to use it for anything else.

Obligatory joke that feels too real:

the onion google opt out village

I’d suggest to recover your account and burn it first: Register in a hell amount of random services for a few weeks to make it confuse about you, so their data about you will be imprecise which has no much value for them.

BUT… don’t be too obvious, make it look like a legit behavior. We must assume they can spot a timestamp when you started burning it.

I say that because I did the same, straight deleted my Google account, but I wish I realized it’d be better to burn it first.

Anyway, not a mandatory thing, your data will become useless eventually, up to date data is more valuable for them than outdated data. They probably just ignore/delete old deleted accounts indeed, since it has each time less updated info.

If it was deleted then how could you recover it

I am in the process of figuring out which things are still tied to my old Google email address (I have been forwarding my emails from it for the last year and changing each account to unique aliases as I find them) so I can finally delete it for good.

Nina Simone now stuck in my head, which is good, as is your achievement. I struggled for years to rid myself of their evil grip.

No problem

So what are you going to use?