Submitted on Wednesday 17th May 2023
Rejected on Monday 22nd May 2023
Current status: Rejected
Rejection code: irrelevant (see below for details)
Legislate so that tech companies cannot delete accounts for inactivity
The government should ban tech companies from deleting user accounts for merely being inactive for an arbitrary amount of time. To discourage this there should be a large fine (noticeable to the yearly profits of a large corporation) for every account deleted in this fashion.
Recently it has been announced that both Twitter, and Google are planning to delete inactive accounts, with other tech companies likely to follow. This risks erasing a huge amount of human history on the internet, but in the case of Googe, where an account is often the key to every online service a person accesses, risks locking people out from everything if they spend longer than a 2 year period unable to log in, such as after a coma, or a prison sentence.
You can't sign this petition because it was rejected. But you can still comment on it here at Repetition.me!
The Government e-Petitions Team gave the following reason:
We can only accept petitions about things the Government or Parliament are directly responsible for.
Decisions about arrangements for closing customers' accounts, including for online services like email and social media, are a matter for individual businesses, not the UK Government or Parliament.
3.137.175.224 Thu, 18 Apr 2024 16:28:37 +0100
