iOS (and soon Android) apps are required to allow users to delete their account. In Wikimedia projects the closest analogue to ‘deleting’ an account is vanishing it. Currently, users on iOS can request their account be vanished from the app (T300080) through a process which sends an email to the Wikimedia Foundation legal team, who consolidate the requests and send them over to the renamers@ mailing list for processing by renamers . This process has a number of downsides - the Legal team have to vet the requests to ensure that they’re legitimate (i.e. the sending email address matches the user’s account email), and the renamers@ queue is much less convenient for renamers than Special:GlobalRenameQueue. The Legal team has not had sufficient capacity to process the requests in a timely manner. With the Android app also needing this process to be integrated soon, we expect a substantial increase in the number of requests coming through.
We’re exploring some options around account authentication (i.e. demonstrating that the person requesting vanishing is the account holder), but still have open questions around where these requests should be sent and how we might reduce volumes. Additionally we are considering automatically processing requests from accounts with zero logged actions in some way if they are authenticated.
We’re open to your thoughts in general about how to improve this process, but we also have some specific questions:
- What does the account vanishing process look like for you? Are there any steps in the process that are particularly frustrating?
- Would you have any concerns if we sent requests to delete/vanish accounts straight to renamers, either through the Queue or to renamers@?
- Do you have ideas about how we could alleviate any concerns you have?
- If we were to do this, what information would renamers need to handle these requests?
- Do you have any concerns about the idea of automatically processing some or all of the vanishing steps for accounts with no logged actions?