In response to growing civic awareness about issues regarding data privacy and data ownership online (which is a very positive development), some people have developed third-party services that promise to contact companies on your behalf to erase your Personal Data.
Private individuals may also tell you they have the right to request that we close your account on your behalf, or take it upon themselves to do so for a variety of reasons, including your personal incapacity or death.
Please note that we have an easy-to-use self-serve feature for closing a Leanpub account:
We do not necessarily close accounts when we are approached by third parties in this way, nor do we even necessarily reply to requests of this nature, precisely to protect your data privacy and ownership rights.
Third-party requests to close Leanpub accounts need to comply with ordinary account security and privacy guidelines. Just because someone has promised they can do this for you, or has taken it upon themselves to do so on your behalf, does not mean they actually know how to write a compliant request to close your account on your behalf, nor does it mean that they have the right to do so, even if you have paid them.
Third-Party Requests to Close Accounts May Be a Form of Fraud, Stalking, or Part of An Identity Theft Scheme
One way for a scammer or stalker to find out if you have an account with a company is to contact that company, citing your name and/or your email address or other personal information, and then asking the company to close your account.
If the company replies and says they have closed the account, that confirms to the scammer or stalker that you had an account with the company.
Knowing that information can help the scammer in a number of ways, including helping them to build a convincing story that they know things about you, like what online platforms you have accounts with, and that you are or have been active on.
Asking the scammer for more information can have the same effect, of confirming that you have an account with the platform.
For this reason amongst others, when we reply to a non-compliant third-party request to close an account, our policy is simply to inform them that their request is non-compliant, and explicitly state that our reply does not confirm that the person they are referring to does in fact have a Leanpub account.
We May Contact You If We Receive A Non-Compliant Request to Close Your Leanpub Account
We need to protect people from being bothered by spam and fraud, and that includes non-compliant requests from third parties to close a user's account.
Literally anyone who knows your email address can email us and ask us to close your account, citing your email address in the email, and claiming to be authorized to make the request.
However, in order to inform users that someone is emailing us about closing their account, in some cases where we receive such a non-compliant request to close a Leanpub account, we may send the following email to the account email address:
EMAIL SUBJECT
We have received a request from a third party to close your Leanpub account
EMAIL BODY
Hi,
We recently received a request from a third party to close your Leanpub account.
If you would like us to close your Leanpub account, please reply to this email to confirm that you would like us to close your account.
If you did not authorize a third party to request the closure of your account, you can just ignore this email.
Kind Regards,
The Leanpub Team
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