Who holds your data, and how to make them delete it
Every service you sign up for keeps something. The question worth asking is not whether they have your data — they do — but how long they intend to hold it and what happens when they are breached.
Laws like the CCPA in California and the GDPR in Europe give people a real right to ask for deletion, and most large companies now honour those requests everywhere because running two systems is more expensive than running one.
- Pick the three services you no longer use and delete the accounts properly — not just the app. Deactivating is not deleting.
- Before you sign up for something new, ask what it needs to know. A newsletter does not need your date of birth.
- Look up “[company name] delete my data” rather than hunting through settings. The request form is usually easier to find from outside.
You can list the companies holding something sensitive about you — financial, medical, biometric — and it is a short list you chose deliberately.
Information you have not digitised does not exist online. Sometimes the right answer is simply not to type it in.
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Last reviewed: September 2026