How to delete your Yahoo! data and shut down your account

How-to
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last updated

Update: Yahoo! has just disclosed yet another data breach. This time of 32 million accounts accessed using "forged" cookies. This follows over a billion accounts compromised over the course of two prior breaches. At this point, it's hard to recommend anyone keep using Yahoo!

Yahoo!'s been in the news as of late for some not-so-great revelations. They apparently built a tool to search customer email, per request of U.S. government agencies. They had more than 500 million accounts hacked. And now they've had 1 billion accounts hacked.

In light of these revelations — alleged or otherwise — you might be interested in closing down your Yahoo! account and scrubbing clean your data. I was pleased to discover Yahoo! makes the process quite simple.

Delete your (Yahoo!) account

  1. Visit Yahoo!'s Terminating your Yahoo! Account page.
  2. Log in with your Yahoo! account.
  3. Type in your password to confirm your identity.

  1. Type in the CAPTCHA code to confirm your humanity.
  2. Click YES to delete your Yahoo! account. You'll see a confirmation page if you successfully deleted your account.

What you need to know about Yahoo! account termination

When you go through the aforementioned process to delete your Yahoo! account, you are terminating the following:

  • Yahoo! ID (which could, in the future, be claimed by someone else)
  • Yahoo! Mail data
  • Yahoo! Address Book data
  • Yahoo! Small Business data
  • Yahoo! GeoCities data
  • Yahoo! Briefcase data
  • My Yahoo! data
  • HotJobs data
  • Flickr account (including photo library, stats, and metadata)

Note: Yahoo! says the deletion process takes about 90 days to complete. If you want your data scrubbed from Yahoo's servers sooner than that, you'll want to go through and delete your Yahoo! emails, Flickr photos, Yahoo! contacts, and more before completing the account termination process.

Yahoo! also warns some of your information "might possibly remain" in its records even after you've deleted your account. To learn more about what data could be left behind, visit Yahoo!'s Data Storage and Anonymization support page.

Questions?

Run into trouble trying to delete your Yahoo! account? Gimme a shout and we'll try to get it figured out!

Mikah Sargent
Mikah Sargent

Mikah Sargent is Senior Editor at Mobile Nations. When he's not bothering his chihuahuas, Mikah spends entirely too much time and money on HomeKit products. You can follow him on Twitter at @mikahsargent if you're so inclined.