I have written to Hi5 on a number of occasions asking them to remove my details entirely from their website. They fail to do this again and again.
My first attempt at closing my account lead to me not being able to access my account, and having to trawl through lots of spam emails to find the one that I had to go through to finally be able to log in. I cancelled all of my 'friends', photos, informaion and details, then did a search for my name. The website still came up, showing one of my 'friends', who I had certainly not added, to have a pornographic picture that showed on my account. I signed in to hi5, and blocked the user, then emailed hi5 to explain that the url was still live and would they delete all information. This was on 24/6/10.
Since then, I have received an email from Hi5 telling me my photo has been removed because it;
* Displays pornographic or sexually explicit material
* Promotes an illegal or unauthorized copy of another person's copyrighted work
* Promotes racism, bigotry, hatred or physical harm of any kind against any group or individual
This is not the case for any of my photos, but the 'friend' who is on my profile with the pornographic photo, is still there!! My profile remains unchanged.
I then received another email saying that my account has been deleted. This is not the case, as I am still able to access the url. I forwarded this email, and detailed my complaint to every email address for them I could find. one of which worked. I received this reply;
Thank you for contacting us at hi5. We are sorry you had trouble canceling your account. Acording to our records you're account was still active. We're sorry to hear that you are canceling your hi5 account. As you requested, we have canceled your account today. You will not be able to log in with this email address or create a new hi5 account using this email address. Your profile and any photos in your profile will be removed from the site. Please note that any comments you left on other member profiles will not be deleted since they are not part of your account.
My account is still active! So I replied to this email stating again that my account is still active, and get another reply atating that it is not, so I wrote back with the url and am waiting for a reply.
Meanwhile, I receive an email to an email account that is completely unrelated saying 'Thank you for joining Hi5', and to click on the link for my account to be active. I emailed back stating that I had not ever accessed Hi5 using that email address.
I am still waiting to hear from them.
Hi5 is an aweful example of social networking, and I have heard a few similar stories about their inability to remove offensive material. Please could you look in to this.
Many thanks
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