I tried to tell LinkedIn back in October that the relationship was over. That I wanted out. I was originally more than a little miffed when that turned out to require writing customer service, but only took a day or so to get a personal response from Michele at Customer Service telling me they got the message and I was gone.
Only I wasn’t. I kept getting those annoying invitations to join networks of people whom I’ve never met. After the third or fourth such invitation, I tried to login again and realized that indeed I hadn’t been deleted, despite the personal note from Michele.
So about a week ago, I tried to write customer service again and request that I be deleted from the system. This time there was no snappy reply and I’m still an active profile on LinkedIn.
Please guys, just lemme out. I’m not even interested in making a new big stink about how bad it is to have leaving the system be a customer service issue. I just really don’t want to get any more emails and I don’t want my profile in your system. Deal?
Jay Jones
on 09 Jan 07In the meantime, can you just go in and edit your profile to remove any contact info? Maybe even “fake” everything so there’s no real information.
DHH
on 09 Jan 07Good thinking, Jay. I’m Mr. DELETED now. Thanks.
mike
on 09 Jan 07this recent article on canceling accounts is related. some accounts are very hard to cancel!
John Doe
on 09 Jan 07I have to resort to replacing my information with fake information all the time with companies that will refuse to shut down my online account. They come up with excuses like we must keep your information on file to comply with the law, which has nothing to do with shutting down my online account. You can still keep my info stored in a database, just shutdown my online acount.
EA pogo games was the worst for me ever when I tried to shut down my account. Not only would they not shut down my online account but random fraud occured too. To make things worse, they were outsource, which explains the fraud. I am all for outsourcing, but there has to be security controls in place.
The best thing you could do is to put fake information, however, there should be a law in place where when a user requests his or her account to be deleted/shutdown, then it should be shutdown within 30 days.
Alexandre Simard
on 09 Jan 07It’s time to resurrect Design Not Found. Cancel Not Found?
warren
on 09 Jan 07being a total jerk to your users is so Web 2.0!
Dr. Pete
on 09 Jan 07For about two years, I had an E-Trade account worth $0.02. Something wierd happened with the timing of the account closing and the compounding of interest, so I kept getting email and snail mail about my virtually worthless portfolio.
Douglas E. Welch
on 09 Jan 07Very interesting that I had a friend with the same complaint today. I think he had larger issues with LinkedIn, but his profile is still active after many attempts to close it.
It sounds like it is time for a little collective action on LinkedIn to get them to purge these accounts, as it appears your experience is all too widespread.
Douglas
Pete
on 09 Jan 07can’t you just change your email account to a fake address?
Jeff Atwood
on 09 Jan 07But Guy Kawasaki says it’s the bomb!
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/01/ten_ways_to_use.html
Personally, I agree with you. It’s a glorified chain letter for make great benefit of glorious nation of LinkedIn.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000703.html
Kay
on 09 Jan 07Hey David,
Send me an email and I’ll get to the bottom of it, ASAP.
Beneford the Fourth
on 09 Jan 07This reminds me of the guy who recorded his conversation while he was trying to cancel his AOL account.
4point44
on 09 Jan 07see < a href = “http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/185-frustration-is-exponential”>the very last post. but seriously, you’re lucky to have an active message board to take your complaint to the right person. (i hope that’s not an overly cynical remark.)
Dave McClure
on 09 Jan 07David: it’s understandable that the “LinkedIn groupie experience” can be frustrating if you’re a notable internet personality. for most folks using LinkedIn, that’s not the typical scenario, but i am aware of several folks like yourself who because of the star-power feel like they’re being abused.
however, in this case, don’t hate the game, hate the playaz—LinkedIn should probably do a better job to help protect the inbox of VIPs, but it’s really your fans / groupies who are the ones inundating you with the fan (e)mail.
consider if you were a traditional offline media notable or rock star—you’d be similarly annoyed that your fans were bugging you everywhere you go, and that the US postal service allowed all sorts of trailer trash to send you snail mail.
anyway, i’m not apologizing for the service too much - they need to change some of their filtering mechanisms - but you might want to reach out to Kay over there and i’m pretty sure she’ll help you out.
(full disclosure: i used to work with Kay at a previous company, and she rocks. i also know the LinkedIn folks pretty well from days at PayPal)
- dave mcclure http://500hats.typepad.com/
Ryan Coleman
on 09 Jan 07I would have just changed my profile’s email account to whatever their customer support email address was. I’m sure it would have been sorted out soon enough.
fred
on 09 Jan 07Who’s “Kay”?
DHH
on 09 Jan 07I don’t hate neither the players or the game. Obviously, lots of people find LinkedIn useful. Good for them. I didn’t and just wanted out. My only beef is the arsine procedures for getting out of the system.
But two people from LinkedIn has now been in touch and hopefully we can work this out. I’ll try my best to get the quit-account operation to be automatic, not manual. That’s the big problem.
Damon Billian
on 09 Jan 07Hi Fred,
Kay works at LinkedIn. Like Dave McClure above, I have to provide the disclaimer that I worked with Kay at SimplyHired & know many of the LI folks from my PayPal days.
adam
on 09 Jan 07I agree with DHH. What kind of BS is don’t hate the player/game nonsense. Forget about if he is a rockstar, not a rockstar or whatever- any person should have the option of deleting his/her account.
Kay
on 09 Jan 07Fred,
I am. Don’t worry, I’m no one you need to worry about.
David Martinez
on 09 Jan 07I’d say this problem is one of those ‘good to have problems’. You have the problem because of your recognition!
If you remove your recognition and repuation, that would be a worse problem.
pwb
on 09 Jan 07If 0.0001% of your users are going to use a function, does it make sense to spend much (any?) time on it?
Chris
on 10 Jan 07Photo.net is another offender. What once was the best photo sharing and information site on the web has degraded in quality due to the founder’s personality disorders. Getting deleted from the site is almost impossible, and the few who have been obliterated from the system have had to go to great lengths. They say that you can delete your account there, but what it amounts to is a message on your profile page saying “this person is no longer active,” but all of your photos and messages remain. Compare to flickr, where a deletion wipes your account, but keeps your posts.
John A. Davis
on 10 Jan 07Serves you right for signing up for something like that. Reminds me of everyone that clicked on the “I love you” virus email.
NO ONE LOVES YOU!!! YOU ARE NOT GOING TO CONNECT TO ANYTHING OR ANYONE!!!!!
:)
Johnny
on 10 Jan 07Some months ago I asked Linkedin to cancel my account. They did it immediately. I tried to login to the system to verify that. It was true. Some days ago I asked to re-activate my account and they did it immediately, maintaining all my connections. I thought they had really deleted my account from their database…
dusoft
on 14 Jan 07Another MR. Deleted here.
This discussion is closed.