僵尸账号，何去何从

The internet is riddled with long-forgotten accounts on social media, dating apps and various shopping sites used once or twice.

互联网上充斥着被遗忘已久的社交媒体、约会应用和各种购物网站账户，这些账户都只使用过一两次。

Sure, you should delete all those unused logins and passwords.

当然了，你应该删掉所有这些不用了的登录和密码记录。

And eat your vegetables.

好好吃菜。

And go to the gym.

锻炼身体。

But is it even possible to delete your zombie online footprints — or worth your time to do so?

不过要完全去除你的网上僵尸印迹可能吗——又或者值得花时间去做吗？

Earlier this month, a little-used social network notified its few users that it will soon shut down.

这个月初，一个门可罗雀的社交网站告知它为数不多的用户说它很快会关闭了。

No, not Google Plus; that came five days later, following the disclosure of a bug that exposed data on a half-million people.

不，课别是是谷歌+呀;五天之后，随着一个漏洞曝光了50万人的数据，它也倒闭了。

The earlier shutdown involved Path, created by a former Facebook employee in 2010 as an alternative to Facebook.

更早关闭的网站还有“路径”，它是由一个前脸书员工在2010年创立的，作为脸书的替代品。

Then there's Ello sending you monthly emails to remind you that this plucky but little-known social network still exists somehow.

然后还有Ello会每月给你发邮件提醒你，这个大胆但鲜为人知的社交网络仍然存在。

It might not seem like a big deal to have these accounts linger.

继续留着这些账号好像也没多大关系。

But with hacking in the news constantly, including a breach affecting 50 million Facebook accounts, you might not want all that data sitting around.

但随着黑客不断出现在新闻中，其中包括影响到5000万个Facebook账户的一次入侵，你可能不希望你这些所有的数据都闲置着。

You might not have a choice if it's a service you use regularly.

如果是你经常使用的服务，你可能别无选择。

But for those you no longer use, consider a purge.

但对于那些你不再使用的，可以考虑清理门户了。

Plus, it might feel good to get your online life in order, the way organizing a closet does.

而且，整理好你的网络生活，就像整理衣橱一样，感觉不错。

Take dating apps such as Tinder, long after you found a steady partner or gave up on finding one.

就拿约会应用，比如TInder来说吧，你找到固定伴侣或者不想再找新对象了就可以删掉了。

You might have deleted Tinder from your phone, but the ghost of your Tinder account is still out there — just not getting any matches, as Tinder shows only "active" users to potential mates.

你可能已经把Tinder从你的手机上删除了，但是你的Tinder账户的幽灵仍然存在——只是没有得到任何匹配，因为Tinder只向潜在的伴侣显示“活跃”用户。

Or consider Yahoo.

或者考虑一下雅虎。

Long after many people stopped using it, Yahoo in 2016 suffered the biggest publicly disclosed hack in history, exposing the names, email addresses, birth dates and other information from 3 billion active and dormant accounts .

在许多人停止使用它很久之后，雅虎在2016年遭遇了历史上最大规模的公开披露黑客攻击，暴露了30亿活跃账户和休眠账户的姓名、电子邮件地址、出生日期和其他信息。

This sort of information is a goldmine for malicious actors looking to steal identities and gain access to financial accounts.

这类信息对那些想要窃取身份并获取金融账户信息的恶意行为人来说就是一座金矿。

Trouble is, cleaning up your digital past isn't easy.

麻烦来了，要清理你数字化的过去并不容易。

For one, finding all the old accounts can be a pain.

首先，要找到所有的旧账户就令人头疼。

For some of us, it might not even be possible to recall every dating site and every would-be Twitter that never was, not to mention shopping or event ticketing sites you bought one thing from and forgot about.

对我们中的一些人来说，甚至不可能回忆起每一个约会网站和每一个可能成为Twitter的网站，更不用说购物或活动票务网站，你从那里买了一样东西便抛诸脑后了。

Then, you'll have to figure out which of your many email accounts you used to log in to a service, then recover passwords and answer annoying security questions — assuming you even remember what your favorite movie or fruit was at the time.

然后，你必须弄清楚在你的众多电子邮件账户中，你曾经登录过哪个服务，然后恢复密码并回答恼人的安全问题——假设你还记得你那时最喜欢的电影或水果是什么。

Only then might you discover that you can't even delete your account.

这时候你才发现你根本没法删除掉自己的账户。

Yahoo, for instance, didn't allow users to delete accounts or change personally identifying information they shared, such as their birthday, until pressured to do so after the breach.

例如，雅虎(Yahoo)不允许用户删除账户或更改他们共享的个人身份信息，比如他们的生日，直到事件发生后，迫于压力才放宽要求。

Even without these hurdles, real life gets in the way.

即使没有这些障碍，现实生活也会成为阻碍。

There are probably good reasons you still haven't organized your closet, either.

同样，你没能整理好自己的衣橱也是有原因的。

Perhaps a better approach is to focus on the most sensitive accounts.

也许最好的办法是关注那些最敏感的账户。

It might not matter than a news site still has your log in, if you never gave it a credit card or other personal details (of course, if you reused your bank password you might be at risk).

如果你从未给新闻网站发过信用卡或其他个人信息(当然，如果你重复使用了银行密码，你可能会有风险)，那么新闻网站仍然有你的登录记录也没有关系。

Rich Mogull, CEO of data security firm Securosis, said people should think about what information they had provided to services they no longer use and whether that information could be damaging should private posts and messages inadvertently become public.

数据安全公司Securosis的首席执行官Rich Mogull说，人们应该考虑他们已经向不再使用的服务网站提供了哪些信息，如果私人帖子和信息无意中被公开，这些信息是否会造成损害。

Dating sites, in particular, can be a trove of potentially damaging information.

尤其是交友网站，可能会成为破坏性信息的宝库。

Once you're in a relationship, delete those accounts.

所以一谈恋爱，就把这项账户删掉吧。

It's wise to set aside a time each year — maybe after you do your taxes or right after the holidays — to manage old accounts, said Theresa Payton, who runs the security consulting company Fortalice Solutions and served under President George W. Bush as White House chief information officer.

安全咨询公司Fortalice Solutions的负责人特里萨·佩顿(Theresa Payton)说，明智的做法是每年留出一段时间来管理旧账户，可能是在你交税之后，也可能是假期过后。佩顿曾在乔治·w·布什(George W. Bush)政府担任白宫首席信息官。

For starters, visit haveibeenpwned.com. This popular tool lets you enter your email addresses and check if it has been compromised in a data breach.

首先，访问haveibeenpwned.com网站。这个流行的工具可以让你输入你的电子邮件地址，并检查它是否在数据泄露中被泄露。

Ideally, the attacked company should have notified you already, but that's not guaranteed.

理想情况下，被攻击的公司应该已经通知你了，但这并不能保证。

Change passwords and close accounts you don't need.

还是要更改密码并关闭您不需要的帐户。

You might also check justdeleteme.xyx, which Payton said could help navigate the "complexities of saying goodbye."

你也可以查查justdeleteme。佩顿说，xyx可以帮助他们应对“告别的难缠”。

The site has a list of common and obscure services. Looking through it might remind you of some of the services you've used back in the days.

该网站列出了一些常见的和不常见的服务。浏览它可能会让你想起以前使用过的一些服务。

Click on a service for details on how to delete your account.

单击某个服务网站以了解如何删除帐户的详细信息。

You might discover that some services simply won't let you go.

您可能会发现有些服务网站根本不会让您离开。

That could be an oversight from a startup prioritizing other features over a deletion tool.

这可能是菜鸟公司的一个疏忽，他们让其他的功能功能级别高于了删除工具。

Or, it could be intentional to keep users coming back.

或者，它可能是有意让用户返回。

There's not much you can do beyond deleting as many posts, photos and other personal data as you can.

除了尽可能多地删除帖子、照片和其他个人数据，你还能做什么呢?

What to do with accounts of people who have died is a whole other story .

如何处理死去的人的记录则又是另一回事。

That said, the prospect of the Grim Reaper — and what sorts of information about you may be exposed after you shed this mortal coil — might just be the motivation you need to clean up your online trail.

也就是说，想到死神——以及在你摆脱了尘世的纠缠之后，你可能会暴露出什么样的信息——可能正是你清理网上痕迹的动机。

对于以往的账户，朋友们有什么看法呢？欢迎给amber留言哦！

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