subscription and data question

freemanfree

I tried a subscription with an online food company, which I did not want to continue with so I cancelled it. There was two option, either I could pause my subscription and re-start it at anytime or just cancel my subscription. I chose cancel, but it appears my subscription has just been paused and if I go into my account I have the option to re-start the subscription and can still see all my details and financial info. I understand things like financial info etc.. has to be kept for 6 years etc.. for account purposes, but would it be within my rights to have the actual user account removed so no one including myself could login and view my details or restart this subscription? 

KatrinaWaves

Pausing would normally pick a date to restart. Cancel is fully cancelled unless you choose to restart. I don’t think any company would have a cancellation option which meant you could never restart a service...

What are you looking to achieve by having your account removed? I don’t think they will, they may remove your access to it but the account would remain, for various reasons, such as making sure only one person in a household accessed ‘new customer’ deals, in case you make claims through your bank you didn’t order them.

I don’t see how stopping yourself logging in will help.

Sandtree

Under GDPR you have the right "to be forgotten" and can request that they erase all data they hold on you however the business can refuse the right where they have legitimate business reasons as why to retain the data. As you say, you could in theory sue them for breach of contract within the next 6 years and so they'd be unlikely to want to delete all your details and thus not be able to defend a case.

There are no particular rights in terms of simply disabling an account; you could ask them to do this but there is no assurances that they have the capability in their IT system if it wasnt a function they considered may be useful. The alternative is setting the email to something other than yours and use a random password generator to change the password without writting it down etc but that does introduce the risk that someone in the future uses that email address and could then access the account.

I'm guessing you ordered something you dont want others to know about? If thats the case maybe they can hide the order rather than the whole account?