Public service announcement
BY THE WAY, if you are or have ever been signed up on Formspring (spring.me), you may or may not be aware that you have been automatically signed up for a breathtakingly scummy dating site called Twoo. I wasn’t aware until very recently, at least, because Gmail rightly tossed all the endless e-mails from it into my spam folder, but when I happened to look in my spam folder for something else, I discovered I’d gotten a bunch of e-mails from spring.me about how it had been “matching” me with random people - people who are probably also Formspring users who never consented to being signed up for a dating site.
I just made an attempt to delete my account; this of course required me to log in to the site, upon which it thrust me into a process for completing my profile and inviting my contacts and gave me no way to do anything until I’d done that. I think I managed to get past the inviting contacts step without actually spamming invites to anyone, but if it somehow did anyway, sorry, guys! Once I’d done that, I followed the instructions in this post to delete my account; note that this involves evading an attempt to get me to “hide” or “refresh” my account instead, and then once I’d written in an angry deletion reason and pressed the Delete button, that just got me a page that was like “No, please don’t leave! We’ll give you a FREE UNLIMITED ACCOUNT FOR THREE DAYS!” and I had to press a “no, seriously, delete my account” button on that page. And after that, it offers a prominent “Reactivate my account” button, indicating that it hasn’t actually deleted my account, just “deactivated” it (on further inspection, it appears they claim they’ll delete your data six months after you delete your account). I’ve seen reports that it continues to e-mail you even after “deleting” your account, too; we’ll see how it goes.
I’m not entirely sure I should even recommend that you go delete your account because, uh, in the process of doing so I had to give up more of my personal information to these seediest of all seedy people. On the other hand, their privacy statement says that among other things they collect your personal data in order to “Register you with and display your profile on other social websites owned by Massive Media Match NV or its sister, daughter or parent companies”, so maybe if you don’t at least attempt to get out they will cheerfully sign you up for more scummy websites. (They also say that if you don’t sign in for six months your account “can” be deleted automatically, which knowing these people probably means “We want you to think we’ll delete your account after six months, but actually we won’t.”)
