Have you recently checked your Myspace account?

You probably should. I’ve deleted my account long before Justin Timberlake took over. Or so I thought… Recently I googled myself, just for fun. I was surprised to find an old photo of mine, which led me straight to.. my old Myspace profile. How on earth was it available again? I couldn’t figure out the correct username/password combination to log in, so I followed the “Forgot password?” link. I entered my username, but I got another error message: “The username you entered could not be found”. The username is the last part of the profile’s URL - so how could it not exist?! None of my email addresses was recognized, either. Then I thought:

I didn’t care if this was a bold marketing move or just an error in their system. I wanted my profile deleted and my photo removed from Google search. It wasn’t as easy as expected, so here I share my journey with you.

Regain access

I’ve found out that regaining access to my profile would be very difficult. Myspace doesn’t even offer a contact email address.. I forwarded my request to their Twitter account @AskMyspace (does not exist anymore), and surprisingly I got an answer a few days later. I had to fill in a declaration of ownership. I was asked to provide some information like the date of birth and zip code listed on the account. I don’t like to reveal such information, so I often use fake data. This could be a problem, since I didn’t know what data I had entered so many years ago. I just hoped that I had used my correct information back then. Fortunatelly, my profile picture was edited a bit and I still had the original file. I attached it to the form assuming this would prove my identity. It actually did - I could finally log in again!

Remove the photo

The second step was to remove the photo. It wasn’t embarrassing, just outdated - with long hair and stuff. I’ve deleted it from my Myspace profile, but apparently they didn’t delete it from their servers. I could still find it on Google image search. Fortunately there is a Google removal tool. I entered both the URL of my Myspace profile and the image URL, hoping for the best, and a couple of days later my photo was removed from Google.

Delete the account

That’s the easy part:

1. Log in to your Myspace account.
2. Go to Myspace account settings.
3. Select “Delete Account” and confirm it.
4. Hope, that the account doesn’t reappear magically.