Myspace. The velvet leisure suit of social media. Fewer than six short years ago, MySpace boasted more members than Facebook. Today, you’ll be hard pressed to find anybody who admits to having an account. The thing is, you know lots of people who have a MySpace profile – but many of them haven’t logged in for years. You might even be one of them.
In 2013, MySpace completed a major re-launch of the site, designed to focus on the one demographic that still preferred MySpace to Facebook: musicians. In the process, years worth of blog posts, messages, and preferences got sent to the digital trash bin. Everything was tossed, except for one thing…the photos.
That means that if you never deleted your account, your MySpace photos are still haunting the internet – available to anyone with a little persistence and an internet connection. And if you’re anything like me, the pictures you uploaded during the MySpace craze were less than flattering.
So here’s what you need to do to delete that pesky old profile once and for all.
If you’ve got still got your login info:
If you know the email and password to your old account, then congratulations! This is going to be a snap for you. All you have to do is log back in, go to your settings and select “delete account”. If you don’t have the password, but you have access to your sign-in email, MySpace will resend it to the address on file, and you’re good to go.
If you don’t have your MySpace login info:
If you don’t have a clue what your email address was when you signed up for MySpace – or you signed up with a college email that has since been de-activated – it’s a little more complicated.
Before you can delete your account, you’ve got to prove it’s yours to delete. You need to sign the MySpace Declaration of Ownership.
Before you fill it out, there are two things to point out: you’ll need to scan a government issued ID, and attach a digital copy to the form. And if you’re a minor, you’ll have to print the document, have your parent or guardian sign it, then scan and attach the signed form to the original document.
You should also keep in mind that the form is going to ask you for all the information we’ve already established you don’t have access to. Don’t give up because you don’t know your old email and password – just put a place-filler in these fields, and press send.
Now you wait.
You should receive an email from MySpace in the next couple of days. I got an email from 'Dexter' in less than 24 hours telling me my old profile had been scheduled for removal.
Phew! Thanks Dexter!
Deleting your profile may not be the eye-rolling ordeal you’d imagine, but if you’ve got some iffy stuff posted there, it’s bound to be a big relief. So if you used to count Tom among your Top 8, but never got around to officially breaking it off, why not do a little digital house-cleaning? After all, there’s really no such thing as ‘MySpace’ or ‘YourSpace’ when it comes to the internet. The internet is 'Everyone’s Space' – for better and for worse.
