People are sharing this article that Consumer Reports printed last week, and I think it’s worth sharing. The upside is that of the services they list, the link does indeed take you right to the Delete Account page. The downside is if you don’t remember your old login credentials you may not be able to delete the account. Especially if you no longer have access to the email account (if any) associated with the social media account.

Old accounts like this are a long term security risk for a few reasons. If you’re like millions of others, there has been a time when you were using the same (or substantially similar) passwords for lots of services, so a data breach at a service like that gives hackers database with thousands of people’s username and password pairs that will work at other sites. The bigger issue as that these accounts often have information that can be used to confirm your identity somewhere.

Those “recover your password” security questions, like first car or mother’s maiden name or name of first elementary school teacher. I had one friend once dismiss a big data breach someone by saying, “I don’t give true answers to those question. I have a set of fake answers that I use everywhere instead.” It took me explaining to him a few minutes before he realized that having the same answers to those questions everywhere meant that learning the fake answers from one site gave other people access to his accounts elsewhere. It doesn’t matter if the answers to the personal security questions are true, just whether they match the answers you’ve give before.

In theory, deleting old accounts should remove all of that kinds of information at the service in question. So, this article may be useful to more than a few of you:

How to Delete Online Accounts You No Longer Need — Having too many digital accounts raises your risk of data being misused or stolen. Here’s how to clean house.