I don’t think that feature should be inside the core WordPress software. With plugins yes, because someone responsible (the site administrator) would and should install that as a conscious decision and not as a built in feature.
The reason is that user’s sometimes make poor choices about their passwords. Having that built in could result is compromised accounts having their data deleted without their knowledge.
I’m sorry but I disagree. People who chose to have poor passwords shouldn’t be used as an excuse not to consider having a feature. If, like you suggest, compromised accounts could have all their user data deleted, then those compromised accounts could also have libelous or sensitive data published online in their name, regardless of a feature to delete their own account.
Yes, it would have to be a conscious decision to install a plugin which offers users a feature to remove their own accounts, but if it was made available as an option in WordPress, you would also have to make the same conscious decision to turn it on.
As you may already know, any user in these forums can edit their display name and associated profile information. For example, you can using this link.
https://wordpress.org/support/profile/bat-n-ball/edit
Here too.
https://profiles.wordpress.org/bat-n-ball/edit/
If someone wants to zap that information as well as randomize their email address to something that does not exist then that will functionally eliminate their account from being used anymore. The account will be abandoned.
I understand your point, but ‘abandon’ is not the same as ‘delete’ – my suggestion was specifically to delete. There could be a multitude of different reasons people might want to delete their own accounts and/or data but ‘zapping’ their profile with some random information will not remove their posts which, for whatever reason, they may no longer wish to be made available.
There are over 7 million posts in these forums going back over 11 years. Asking volunteers to handle those deletion/edit request is unreasonable. It would become a full time job just doing that. That’s who staffs these forums, it’s all unpaid volunteers.
Nobody suggested volunteers go through millions of posts to handle individual deletion requests. If it is a limitation of the current system then so be it, but it would not be beyond the realms of possibility to write an automated system to do the task which is why I made the suggestion.
In recent years, Twitter, Google, Facebook etc., have made the deletion of one’s own account a possibility and, if I’m not mistaken, ‘the right to be forgotten’ (an associated, although not identical topic) has become law in certain European countries.
Google and the big companies might have the resources to implement such features at the drop of a hat, but the way things seem to be going with people’s privacy and personal data, maybe it’s a subject which should be kept in mind.
