When I was a child, I made an account on Instagram.
I have since entirely lost my login for both it and the email I used for it.
I’ve tried over the years to try and fill in forms and contact Meta in hopes of getting it deleted to no avail.
At this point I’m probably just going to either figure out how to send an actual letter to them or complain to my country’s data protection organisation.
What do y’all suggest?
I would just let it go at this point. Why get Meta to associate something to a now adult you?
I dont think Meta was ever explicitly allowed to have childrens accounts, especially on Instagram. Acknowledging that they accepted minors in sort of makes them liable in the face of COPA and other “protect the children” laws.
Like @JG I would just ignore it for now. If you really want a new Meta account for Instagram for whatever purpose -we will discourage you though - but ultimately, it may be best to just make a new one unless its one of those single word accounts that has value. If so, check if your country likely has some sort official facebook presence, like an office and head there in person.
By lost, do you mean lost access or lost details? I’ve been able to delete old accounts that I don’t have access to (including the e-mail) by providing the username/e-mail. If you’ve lost the details, then that’s a lost cause.
It would only matter if there’s PII on your account. Either way, I’m not surprised Meta hasn’t responded to your privacy request.
Meta is not going to do anything, because Meta is shit. They count all accounts as active users to pretend they are growing, and keep their stock prices going up. Obviously they don’t want to delete any of them. If you have no way of regaining access (via email or phone number) which I’m assuming is the case, then it’s basically a lost cause.
You could try the regulatory route through your jurisdiction. However, keep in mind that without access, it may be difficult to prove that the account is actually yours in the first place. Unless there is actually some identifying information on it that links back to you.
If that’s the case, it’s worth trying. If not, I would just leave it. It will just be another of millions (billions?) of abandoned accounts from bots and dead people