Deleted your Yahoo! Account? Check again…

After the multiple Yahoo! data breaches and debacle last year, I, along with many decided to delete my Yahoo account. Yahoo! News

This was an ancient email I had setup, had no personal data in it anymore and had a unique password. But it’s a part of my digital footprint that I no longer required and decided, given the horrible security practices going on @ Yahoo (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/14/yahoo-hack-security-of-one-billion-accounts-breached) to vote with my account and have it removed.

Thankfully this was a fairly straight-forward process, just hit up the link below, verify who you are, read the T&C’s, enter the CAPTCHA and you’re done.

The following appears on the page -

In most cases your account will be deactivated and then deleted from our user registration database in approximately 90 days. This delay is necessary to discourage users from engaging in fraudulent activity. Additionally, due to the limited number of names available, we may allow other users to sign up for and use your current Yahoo! ID and profile names after your account has been deleted.

During this time, you can actually log back into your account (not great, but understandable give the above timelines) so I re-did the account removal and decided to set a reminder for 91 days to check that my account had been blown away.

That day happens to be today, and whatta-ya-know, I was able to login (after verifying with 2FA) and access my account.

The facepalm is stong…

My Questions/Suggestions for Yahoo!