Do you know what’s more tiring than updating all of your personal information and the information on all of the websites that you can think to update?

Doing that while working on migrating clients to a new maintenance platform, one at a time.

Do you know what’s even more tiring than that?

Determining that the first solution that you’re migrating your clients to likely won’t fit your needs just yet, and having to migrate them to something else.

I can’t say that I didn’t spend a lot of time on the computer this weekend, but I can say that I did waste a lot of time on the computer in unproductive ways.

On the bright side I did finish Broad Band by Claire L. Evans this morning, and I greatly enjoyed it. I’ll try to do some book reviews again in the future that aren’t just an annual overview like last year.

So I haven’t been secret about it, but I also haven’t been discussing it a ton since I was waiting for it all to get sorted out. I’ve been working on getting my name changed since around September of last year, and I’ve finally begun getting updated official IDs and updating all of my internet things this past week. From now on my name is officially david Wolfpaw.

It wouldn’t be worth writing about if I just took my husband’s name when we married, but we decided not to do that. However I couldn’t shake the thought, and was considering what other things that I could do. I’ve been changing so many things around and becoming more of an adult, and realized that I could just do whatever I wanted.

My previous last name, only seven letters long, was complex in it’s simplicity. It was hard for people to pronounce even after having it pronounced for them, and it was even harder for some people to spell, again after having it spelled out for them. As an example, the paperwork got delayed for a few months because the clerk of court who filed my document, that I printed out with the correct spelling, filed it under an incorrect name and it got lost and had to be amended. Three months gone to that!

Not to mention the fact that I was not the only one with my name, and not even the only one with the same first, middle, and last name that lives in the state of Florida. I decided that if I were going to change, I would take cues from my husband’s name, but choose something that I did not see anyone currently using as a last name.

To that end, I spent plenty of time thinking, and I admit that I’ll never feel fully comfortable with my decision, having changed a core identifier (so that I’m not just one of the many WordPress davids) after establishing myself, and crossing that 30-year-more-adult-threshhold.

The joke I’m going with for now is that while my husband got one finger, I get to have the whole paw. The other joke is on me, when I found out that furries ruin everything™, because it turns out that the name wolfpaw is being used as a screen name already on about 2/3 of the services that I have tried swapping accounts on. The person who has @wolfpaw on Twitter has at least four separate accounts that I easily found, and they’re all sitting inactive for years.

Speaking of changing services, some websites make it far harder than it should be to change names or usernames. I get that I need to show documentation to the bank or my credit card company, but the annoying websites that I mentioned last week treat their ownership of my outdated data too seriously.

After months of waiting, the past week has actually progressed rather rapidly. I went to court last week, confirmed that I wasn’t trying to hide from the law by going to the lair of the law itself (although I guess I should stopped being surprised when I hear people getting caught that way), and the judge passed the order. After that I waited a bit to get some documents, then used those to start getting all of the other ones.

So that’s my weirdish story on changing my name to something made up yet still based on real words that will probably be an entirely different source of confusion for a few years at least. If only I was Henry Lizardlover who made it super clear with his last name what his deal was ????

And say that I made a delicious meal, got to play some board games with friends and family, and read a bit.

I also managed some client sites, fixed a few bugs with a theme, and worked on migrating to a new business platform.

Some days are simply full enough as is. Today was one of those days. I’m a bit upset that I didn’t do a full blog post, but I’m glad for the things that I did get done. And that’s going to be enough.

I was thinking about my blog today, and the challenge that I’ve undertaken. I’ve also been thinking lately about other ways that I can get involved in the IndieWeb community besides running an alternative to Twitter and playing around with tools.

I have been interestd in the community from the sidelines ever since I’d heard of it, but like most communities I either never join or wait until years of quietly lurking to get involved. In this case I want to end that and find some project that I can make some contribution to.

The reason that it interests me so much is in part a nostalgia for the older days of the web. Everyone had their own identity and most websites that you visited were low budget affairs made by someone with a passion for the specific topic of that site. Many of my earliest memories of the web were fan sites for the pop culture that I was interested in at the time.

But why do I bother maintaining my own blog now that the web has been subsumed by Twitter, Facebook, and all of the other social media sites that we pour most of ourselves into these days? Even if I want to write something longer, can’t I just put it up on Medium?

It’s Important to Have Your Own Space

Being able to share and interact easily with others is valuable, and it’s a reason why most of us have moved into the walled gardens that have been created to collect our data. But there are also limitations to playing in someone else’s sandbox.

If you have your own space, you can do a lot with it. You can have those wonderful branded emails that make you look more official, even if you forward them elsewhere. You get to set the tone of the space, and design it to fit your needs and aesthetic. Don’t like the way that it looks? Change it!

You can also dictate what happens in that space, including what is and is not included, updated, added, removed, or modified. You get to be more in control of your web presence, and not just let your presence there be in control of you.

Ownership is Valuable

Let’s not forget some of the dangers of putting most of your emphasis on someone else’s platform, like inadvertently sharing enough data about yourself and others to help swing an election. Or making yourself a better target for all manner of people eager to scrape your data, from marketers to harassers.

You also have portability to worry about. If you chose to leave Facebook today, what would you do with all of the content that you created there? Would you be able to easily move it to another platform, so that all of the posts, pictures, videos, and other content that you’ve created and shared over the years lives on after your account does not?

What happens when those websites disappear and/or delete your data, as so many social social networks have over the years that I don’t even want to link every word in this sentence to one? What about when they get sold to another company that doesn’t share the same values of the original company, and your content is censored like LiveJournal started doing under Russian ownership?

Be a Part of the Solution

The point is, when you don’t own your data and presence, someone else does, and they get the ultimate say in it. Having a space to call your own online means that you always have a refuge from that lack of agency.

There are many ways that you can get involved, and many more that I’m learning the deeper that I get into research. I’m starting with my own site here, and the archives that I keep of things that I do online. What will you do to keep some portion of the web that you create in your control?

This morning I started tackling a todo that I’ve been meaning to handle for a while: going through my LastPass account manager and checking on the ~600 sites and 900ish entries that I have. This is after some regular small cleanups in the past to satisfy their vault password challenge requirements.

I don’t want to just go through and delete old account logins, though I admit that would be much easier than what I got myself into. Instead, I decided that I should go to old accounts that I no longer use and actually delete them and their associated data before removing account information.

I have accounts with highly personal information, beyond my name and even address, up to information for my parents, finances, schooling, and more, all with various levels of account deletion abilities. This isn’t the kind of information that I want to purposefully leave in databases that I don’t have control of after having put the information there myself.

All of that considered, I began the slog of working through that long list, looking for sites that I still use, are for clients, I no longer need, or aren’t even online anymore (more than I’d have suspected at the start).

How Hard is This?

For many websites it’s not terrible. You may have to navigate multiple screens, but the delete feature is available to you. Even Facebook, which I finally got rid of a couple of months ago, has a self-delete tool, though I question how much that actually deletes, and that is still harder than it should be to find.

Several websites require you contact support, which is a pain but not entirely surprising. What is a pain is how hard it is to contact support on these sites. Several sites offer phone support only, or chat support that often won’t load with an ad-blocker on.

The sites that are most infuriating are the sites that don’t allow you to access your account details at all after logging in without extending your subscription. Intuit and AgileCRM are two examples of this type of site, which allow me to login to my account, but won’t allow me to progress beyond a “give us more money because you’re expired” interstitial. This means that even if I’m signing in solely to get rid of the highly personal data that they have stored on me, I can’t. Both have received emails from me, along with the other sites that I can’t delete myself from.

A Barnes and Noble support person directly told me twice that they do not delete accounts, even after I questioned whether that option would become available after 25 May.

What about WordPress?

Funny enough, for as long as I used WordPress on hundreds of accounts, many of them administrators, I didn’t realize that standard users don’t have the ability to delete their own accounts. Thanks to the forthcoming General Data Protection Regulation taking affect in the EU in under two weeks, WordPress core has been considering how to comply and addressing those issues, albeit slower than a project of this size should be taking it up.

While I don’t know how it’ll work, it does look like the idea of being able to delete your own data and anonymize it is being worked on (#43637 (Add filters and ajax support for personal data erasure) – WordPress Trac). It’s yet to be seen how this will work for an end user, but I hope that it becomes as easy as many other features of WordPress have become.

Who are the Winners?

Some services deserve to get called out, but for being easy to delete as opposed to challenging or impossible. Simplenote and Firefox are two examples that place the delete account button directly on your account page, without the need to hunt around.

Why Does this Matter?

Maybe it doesn’t to you. It probably won’t be an issue for me either, but like subscriptions to newsletters that I am unwittingly added to, old accounts quickly pile up.

Some accounts I forget exist because they were created for a one time purpose, like a document signing website that I had to sign up for to sign for a lease on an old apartment. That site does not have a self-delete tool, yet it maintains my previous and current address, contact information, and financial information that was used to verify my lease elligibility.

It should be unacceptable that we cannot control accounts that we create on websites that we supply with our data. If I choose to no longer use that website I should have better recourse than just forgetting that my data is out there in a place that is specifically unwilling to let me manage and remove it.