Well they didn’t delete your account fully and they still have your email. When you hand information over, don’t ever assume or trust them to fully get rid of it.
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025
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They just changed your username to DELETED?
This would be funny if it wasn’t so concerning.
There was recently a blog post (about acc deletion and gdpr) shared here where the company did exactly that and the blogwriter could even still log in.
Will insert link later when I have time to dig it out.
So many places just do something like that, since the data itself rarely can be deleted easily.
Any halfway competent DBA could delete it from live databases easily. Your account is going to have a unique identifier.
It's usually done for compliance purposes regarding data retention.
Yeaaahhhh any competent DBA would be crucified for doing physical deletion nonchalantly in an actual corporate environment… Due to integrity issues within one database or across several ones in complex chains. Honestly a lots of the times logical deletion is preferred anyway. And then that deletion request would be propagated via events and then, maybe, possibly physically deleted. What’s the point in those over simplifications ? Makes dba looks lazy imho which isn’t a nice thing to do.
Might be that your account is DELETED, their systems recognise it's DELETED, but you were somehow still present in their mailing lists.
Nice to meet you, DELETED
Weird shit can happen when one applies right to be forgotten. For some purposes data must be kept nevertheless (for tax obligations for example) while for marketing not (and even then some might argue legitimate interest and not fully deleted all instances of your data). And then the week after some stupid asshole reconcile invoice data with mailing lists and here you are.
I’m concerned that they had some AI comb their database and it recovered OP’s email address, couldn’t find a matching name, but re-added it to the mailing list none-the-less.
That certainly happens without any ai involvement… reconciliation processes are a very established thing…
Hi, Deleted. I'm jackhammer_joe
Thank you for coming to my DELETED talk
Lol, I don't have a meta account, yet I get a newsletter (had oculus, didn't agree to transfer).
I am 100% certain no company deletes anything and just moves stuff to a shadow database, sometimes not even that.
It's usually just flagged as deleted, so the system shouldn't interact with the data anymore. Often this is done for compliance reasons since some regulations require several years of data retention.
Make sure it isn't phishing. But if it isn't, then it would mean they still have your e-mail address stored somewhere. I could imagine that the mailing list subscription stores the e-mail address separately from the account info and they just fucked up deleting it. Might be worth trying to contact them.
If you're in Europe I'm guessing that you have a GDPR breach case.
Note that I'm not a lawyer and don't pretend to be one on the internet.