Update: The answer to my question wasn’t certain, but the conclusion I came to is that there’s no option to delete my account for this Japanese website.

I have absolutely no clue where else to ask this. All the places I’ve thought of, I feel that people would get mad for being off topic.

First off, I can’t read Japanese. Some months ago I created an account on a Japanese website called 5Channel (be.5ch.net) because I was trying to help share an archival project for the Nintendo 3DS SpotPass service, which was shutting down at the time. I used Yandex translator to screenshot the web pages and navigate and understand the site and how to create an account. After making an account, I never ended up figuring out how to actually use the website.

So now, it’s been a few months, and all I want to do is delete the account which I no longer need. I’ve been using Yandex again to try to find a settings page for my account where I can delete it, but I simply cannot find the option anywhere. I know with some sites, you need to contact the site owners through email to delete your account, which is normally mentioned in the websites policy agreement. But no matter where I look, I simply can’t find any information on how to find this policy. Does anyone have any advice and/or knows a better place to ask for help with this? Thanks.

  • @CrackhappyEnglish
    15•5 months ago

    I’m going to ask a simple question. Why do you think that you need to delete that account?

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      12•5 months ago

      It’s not good to ever keep random accounts abandoned. It’s just good security and often privacy hygiene that most people don’t practice. I already have over 100 accounts total across the internet, and am planning to skim that number down drastically. It’s especially important security & privacy hygiene, because if you leave dozens of accounts abandoned and the services experience a data breach, the fact that your data is now out there is partially your own fault, and since we’re on the english-speaking side of the internet, I doubt we’re going to hear about a data breach for some random Japanese site.

      • @TootSweetEnglish
        14•5 months ago

        Your concern is that a breach of the site’s data may leak some information about you that you wouldn’t want to leak, yes?

        If so, and if you can still use similar methods to navigate the site in question, use those methods to edit your account/profile details to scrub the account of anything that you wouldn’t want to leak. Change it to use a fake name. Change the email address to somthrowaway email address. Change the password to something unrelated to any passwords you could possibly use on any other sites so that if the hash is leaked and brute forced, no one can use that to gain access to any of your other accounts. Delete individual posts or pieces of content that you’ve uploaded.

        Actually, I can read (barely) enough Japanese to figure out that the registration process seems to only want your email address and password. (Though I haven’t gone through the whole signup process.) You mentioned uploading a file, yeah? I’m guessing the amount of stuff you’d have to do to overwrite/delete every bit of data they have on you is pretty limited.

        And, yes, I suppose there’s the potential caveat that that might not affect backups and such, but I’d wager a lot of the other account deletion requests you’ve done don’t affect things like backups either.

        • @[email protected]OPEnglish
          5•5 months ago

          Yeah, scrubbing it like that is usually a last resort, I generally try to delete the profile, and if I can’t, I scrub it with unidentifiable information. If I already happen to know from the policy that they keep your data for a period of time after deletion, I scrub it before deleting.

    • @[email protected]English
      7•5 months ago

      Yeah, just leave it. If the issue is that they keep sending you emails, redirect them to your spam/trash. Done.

      • @[email protected]OPEnglish
        -3•5 months ago

        I didn’t say anything about them sending me emails. But yeah, if that was an issue I would have done that, so thanks.