Ironically, data brokers need to collect additional info to verify your identity and ensure they’re deleting the right person’s data.

What if I don’t live in California?Only California residents have the right to data deletion under CCPA. (Why companies have the right to your data and you do not is another story. And here’s another. And another.)But some companies have said they’ll honor deletion requests no matter where you live. Spotify, Uber and Twitter said they treat deletion requests from any geographic location the same. Netflix, Microsoft, Starbucks and UPS have also said they’ll extend CCPA rights to all Americans.

The company will probably ask for you to send over additional information or set up an appointment to verify your identity — that’s so no one can pretend to be you and steal or delete your data. To verify, you may need to confirm your account username and password, provide a piece of data like your phone number for the company to cross-check, or, rarely, show your government-issued ID. You should never be required to set up an account to get your data deleted, according to CCPA.

People have to verify their identities before companies can delete data, which poses an extra obstacle.

Nobody can see deleted accounts - not even developers. Deleted accounts are fully deleted. There's nothing to see basically by definition.

There is no active user with that ID, so you cannot search by it. The whole point of deleting an account is to make it inaccessible, unreferenced, and unlinked. We're not going to implement "soft" account deletion.

You cannot. And you're not supposed to. When an account is deleted, it is disassociated from all existing posts by design.

The industry’s first standard for handling user data deletion requests