(Answered-ish) Where should I ask for help deleting an account for a Japanese website?

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.

Brkdncr ,

Amazon Turk?

tiredofsametab ,

You could try looking for 消去 but I didn't see anything with a google site search. I'm not going to visit the actual site.

DreitonLullaby OP ,

What is 消去? DeepL translate says it means "Elimination". I'm not sure what you want me to do with this.

tiredofsametab ,

It can mean delete in some contexts.

DreitonLullaby OP ,

Oh ok, thanks. Not sure why some people are downvoting me for not knowing Japanese though. I'll try to see if I can find those symbols on the site, but so far the furthest account option I've been able to find is to change the password.

tiredofsametab ,

I didn't see it in the search. They may use other terms like 閉める or something, but we have no legal requirement here that I know of to allow for account deletion. No company I worked for did until we wanted to do business where things like GDPR (I think it's called) is a thing.

DreitonLullaby OP ,

Thanks. I can't find anything like that. Here's some screenshots of what the profile settings look like. These seem to be the whole sites profile/accounts options. Maybe there's just no option.

jonne ,

Don't the built in translation features for Chrome or Firefox work? If not, I agree with the others to just leave it. A lot of websites don't even have the functionality to delete accounts to begin with.

DreitonLullaby OP ,

Nah, I can't get the Firefox translating to work. And websites not having a built-in account deletion option is the reason many sites offer (usually buried in their policy) the option to have it manually deleted, only if you directly contact them via email. I've done this with a few websites before and it's a pretty easy process.

TootSweet ,

I think having a way to delete accounts is legally required by some jurisdictions. And sometimes if a site does business in such a jurisdiction and are required to have a way to do that, they'll still offer that option those outside the jurisdictions in question. (It's easier to just allow everyone who asks than to have rules keeping track of who can and can't legally demand it.)

But if this is an image board hosted in Japan intended for a Japanese audience, and if Japan has no such legal requirements (or if such requirements don't apply here for some reason), then, your experience with websites that operate in/for countries where they speak your language(s) notwithstanding, it's highly plausible this site just doesn't have any way to delete accounts.

tiredofsametab ,

last I checked, FF doesn't have support for full-page translation of Japanese. It's basically the only reason I still use Chrome sometimes.

DreitonLullaby OP ,

I think they support it now in Firefox, but didn't used to; they just don't currently support it with Japanese as far as I know. I'm sure I was looking at a Chinese or French website some months ago and it worked with Firefox's built-in page translator.

Crackhappy ,
@Crackhappy@lemmy.world avatar

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

SolOrion ,

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

DreitonLullaby OP , (edited )

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

SolOrion ,

I just couldn't think of any other reason you'd care.

DreitonLullaby OP ,

Fair enough, but I gave my reason in another comment, so you should read that if you want to know.

padjakkels ,
@padjakkels@lemmy.world avatar

So toxic

DreitonLullaby OP , (edited )

I'm toxic? I'm sorry, how?

DreitonLullaby OP ,

Could you honestly tell me how I'm being toxic please. I think you're misunderstanding me and I genuinely want to know why you think this.

DreitonLullaby OP ,

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.

TootSweet ,

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.

DreitonLullaby OP ,

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.

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