How to Delete Old AOL and Yahoo Accounts

How to Delete Old AOL and Yahoo Accounts

  • With AOL and Yahoo changing owners for the second time in a half-dozen years, now is a good time to delete any old and unused accounts. 
  • Verizon has agreed to sell AOL and Yahoo to the private-equity firm Apollo Global Management for $5 billion, significantly less than the combined purchase price of $9 billion for the two media companies in 2015 and 2017.
  • One of the most significant assets being sold to Apollo is the mountain of consumer data compiled by AOL and Yahoo over the decades. Yahoo still has about 900 million monthly users, and there are probably millions of additional people who set up AOL or Yahoo accounts years ago and then let them languish.
  • Apollo is likely to go to work trying to make more money off that data.
  • If your accounts have been idle, you’re letting corporations trade your data and make money from it with no benefit to you. And if there’s ever a data breach—such as a Yahoo data breach that began in 2013 and affected 500 million users—it just means hackers will get more of your information, which could be used for scams or identity theft.
  • It’s easy to transfer old emails to most other email services. For instance, if you want to move Yahoo emails to a Gmail account, open your Gmail settings, then click on the Accounts & Import tab, and follow the directions.

– Allen St. John | May 6, 2021