 Hello zoomers, I hope you're all enjoying your Saturday morning in this video I want to talk about something well really the more Orwellian nature of tech companies nowadays now last week I wanted to do something very simple or something that I thought of as being very simple That is from 10 years or so ago. I have an Amazon account I think I bought a couple things from Amazon in high school or something like that I mean this was way back when Amazon only sold things That was like the one thing they did and of course I was never a big fan of Amazon just because It's really hard to find anything on Amazon cheaper than it is on eBay and I've used eBay for years and years I know some people are afraid of buying from other people, but I've never had a problem with it So I never really used Amazon except for you know every once in a while some publisher will publish with Amazon or something Like that and that's the only place you can get their stuff So anyway last week I was like I'm gonna delete my Amazon account every once in a while I get an email from them I never use it. I just want to declutter the stuff I have I usually delete accounts that I'm not using on the internet now I as I found out deleting an Amazon account is one of the most difficult things to do On the internet well not not the most difficult, but it's way more difficult than it should be And I'll just say you know this is what a lot of companies I'll explain what you have to do to delete an Amazon account in a second But this is one of the things that a lot of companies have started to do It's a kind of libertarian paternalism where they'll allow you to close your account But they are gonna play any kind of psychological trick on you for you to keep it because they want your metadata They want your ad revenue. They want whatever else you can they can get from you now Another account I've had some experience with a couple years back someone made me a Facebook That didn't last very long before I deleted it But one of the things about Facebook which some of you guys may have struggled with in fact is that if you want to delete a Facebook account You can only deactivate it and what that means is it goes on a period of like Okay, you've deactivated your Facebook account It will be fully deleted in like 60 or 90 days or something like that But if you try and log on in that period your account will be totally reactivated And it's a psychological trick because even if you're totally sure today that you want to delete your Facebook account And even if you know okay Facebook is terrible for me. I'm gonna get rid of it If you change your mind even for a moment in that next month or so Well, it's totally reactivated the death counter resets and you have to do it all over again So that's a good trick to get people on Facebook now. I totally understand some You know making it more difficult than just clicking one thing to delete an account For example, you know Obviously, you want to be able to confirm if you actually want to delete maybe even confirm twice because you got to be totally sure In fact, I even understand sending me an email to confirm just in case someone else has hacked my account And I don't want them to delete something, but let me tell you what Amazon I had to do to delete my Amazon account so um Now first off I went to their settings page and I expect there to be a delete my account Option there wasn't and I struggled with that for several minutes desperately looking in all the you know 20 different menu options for something like that But eventually I just internet searched it or searched it on YouTube frankly It's sad when you have to search how to delete an account on YouTube or something like that And I found out that in order to do well first off to delete an Amazon account It's getting more and more difficult, but here's what I had to do first off you have to go to What is it like some kind of like ticketing service or some kind of customer care? You know all the stuff where they have like oh did you get the wrong package? Did you get something else? Is there some kind of technical problem? You have to go to that page now The option is not there to delete your account instead. What you have to do is you have to you have to submit some kind of request and Then you have to directly talk to Amazon and when I mean Amazon I don't mean click a button. I mean you have to talk to someone now It seems historically you had three options nowadays you have two and that is you used to be able to email Some Amazon representative and get your account deleted. Maybe you can't do that anymore What you have to do nowadays is you either have to live chat with a pageete or You have to manually call them and doubt. I didn't try that But doubtlessly you'd end up talking to a robot or something like that now this already is a hilarious Kind of a trick to get people not to delete their accounts because frankly when I'm on the internet and I'm cleaning things up I don't want to have to talk to someone to do something basic like this. I mean, I don't want to chat with some random guy I don't need to explain to them what I want to do. I just want to delete my account This isn't some kind of a I don't know and they know this mind you There are a lot of companies that do this that put customer service either through You know You'll either have to call or chat with them and they do this not because it's a better way of getting some things done This is a deleting an account is something very simple to get done They do it because they know that people are less likely to interact with someone. They don't know on the internet It's a nice way of okay more people are gonna say that and say okay. I'm not gonna bother But anyway, I really wanted to leave my mind my account So I decided I chose to chat with a pageete option. So And of course they tell pageete as I log on what exactly I want I want to delete my account. That's what I selected But of course then I I'm on Inquisition I have to explain why I'm gonna delete my account. Of course. I didn't explain why I'm just like I just want my account deleted I don't really need a reason and of course he acquiesced cuz you know, he has to be customer service or whatever I forget pageete's name is wasn't pageete, but um Anyway, so after that happens does he delete my account? No, I get an email and This email which frankly should have happened in the first place is just an email to confirm that I want to delete my account And I have to respond once I do that once pageete sends me this email to respond to is My account deleted. No, I got to wait another 24 to 48 hours for it to be deleted and in fact even after that I think I logged on and It was still on or something like that now. I think my Amazon account has finally been deleted, but I know that This is like literally a boomer rants and woods video because I'm there's no content other than I'm very upset by this But there's a there's a point behind it and that is um You know these companies legally they can't do a bunch of stuff. They can't you know Just make it impossible for you to leave I'm sure you know there there can be legal ramifications for keeping data without your consent And even if they're not punished and even if the government is actually benefiting them from them But regardless they make it as hard as possible for you to do things that they don't necessarily want Another thing that I tried to do yesterday I have a PayPal account and if you don't know PayPal has two tiers they have a personal account and a business account and You can easily change from a personal account to a business account That's super easy to do but in order to switch back to a personal account you have to basically call in to PayPal and Like manually call in and talk to a robot person and it's not one of those robot persons where you can just press the buttons It's one of the robot persons where you are talking to this non-existent person and they say something like please explain and several words What you actually want to do and it's like can you not just give me number options? I'm not gonna stand here in the middle of the woods talking on the phone and seem like an idiot because I'm talking to some robot I'm not gonna do that But that's again, it's a kind of psychological trick that people do it makes you less and less likely to do It's a kind of libertarian fraternalism now with respect to PayPal I will note the reason they want you to use a business account my hypothesis at least is You know the business accounts let you have a donut donate button now If someone sends me money on PayPal dot me PayPal dot me slash Luke M Smith I will actually get all that money, but if I use my business account to make a donate button PayPal will actually get a cut of that money and it's my hypothesis that that's what PayPal is actually trying to do They're actually just trying to You know get a little cut and they don't we just convert back to a personal account because of that So anyway, you know granted These kind of companies Amazon and stuff. They're only getting worse and I recommend you if you don't really use any of these Accounts I recommend you go ahead and delete whatever you have because it's only gonna become more difficult They're only only gonna have more and more hassles and they change how they do this Amazon Actually changes the way you delete the their account every couple of months making it adding in more and more steps So it's only gonna get more difficult So anyway, this has been another boomer ranting and woods episode. I will see you zoomers next time