grep jason_
omg.lol

If you thought you deleted your Evernote account, you didn’t.

This is anecdotal evidence, since it is just my experience. But, on the off chance that this is widespread, I think people should know about this.

This all took place over the course of about 45 min on Wednesday night, July 5th, 2017.

After having it brought to my attention that I still had an Evernote account (that I had not been using in quite a long time), I went down the path of deleting the account.

Step One: Get into account
I tried to do this on my iPad, but found nothing but “sign up” buttons. Not a single log in button. Annoying, but anyway, I moved over to my MacBook Pro and logged in successfully.

Step Two: Go to settings and find “Delete Account” button
Like so many web services now, this option does not exist. There is however a “Deactivate Account” option. Also annoying, because what the hell does “deactivate” actually mean..?

Delete Evernote Screenshot

Their advice of “Return to your notes and delete any private notes and empty your trash” is pretty telling that none of your data is removed from their system when you deactivate, but who knows, maybe it is?

Step Three: Click Deactivate account and get logged out.
That should be the end of the line, but in my case it wasn’t. Remember how I said I started this process on my iPad, and then moved to my MacBook Pro? Well, when I returned to my iPad I found I was still logged in. Probably just cached and would log out upon trying to do anything with the interface? WRONG.

I was able to navigate the UI, create new notes, modify tags, and even send invites to collaborate on newly created notes. Shouldn’t this account be unusable?

Delete Evernote Screenshot

I was able to navigate the UI, create new notes, modify tags, and even send invites to collaborate on newly created notes. Shouldn’t this account be unusable?

This got me thinking that perhaps I didn’t finish the deactivate process on my MacBook, so I went back to my MacBook and attempted to login to the account. I was presented with this:

Delete Evernote Screenshot

This shows that the account was “deactivated” but posed another concern. Remember what it said in the first dialog up above?

When your account is deactivated, you will be logged out of Evernote, and this account will no longer be usable. You will not be able to create another account with your same email address.

Well that doesn’t seem to be true since the login page tells you the account was deactivated and gives you a chance to reactivate..

So, bottom line. You can never get rid of your account and if you don’t explicitly delete ALL your data and empty the trash, your stuff will live on within Evernote’s walls indefinitely.

Message to all web services:
Just let people delete their damn accounts and purge all their personal data in the process.