Monday, April 11, 2005

Expiring On-Line Accounts

In this article from Bruce Schneier, he talks about the difficulty (in the US at least) of closing an on-line account with an e-commerce site. Thus, if you've entered credit card details, there's always the chance that an account you don't use could be hacked, exposing the user to fraud.
I like the idea of auto-expiring on-line accounts for e-commerce, and I think every site should provide an easy way to close an account (and delete presonal and credit card data from the merchant's database).

From my own experience running AlbumCity.com (an e-commerce site in Eastern Europe), I can confirm that at least in Europe many users want the ability to close an account. Our site didn't allow for this (through the web interface), and I was initially surprised by the number of users that asked for it. Was always a pain to do, because I had to go in the DB and remove the entries by hand (something I never had time to do).

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