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Is it possible that I can delete questions in SO which have 3 answers and some comments? Due to privacy concern, I definitely need to delete that.

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    Privacy as in your employer is questioning your credentials?
    – random
    Commented Apr 18, 2011 at 3:42
  • something similar to that , by mistake i used company email in sample code and that has been indexed by all internet , now i don't want my company to know my SO account ID from that
    – Mirage
    Commented Apr 18, 2011 at 3:48
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    Just change the email address in the sample code. Deleting it won't remove it from all over the Internets, either.
    – Cody Gray
    Commented Apr 18, 2011 at 3:58
  • I did that but some sites still have old code and link to my quetsion from there. i have merged my account with new one so when someone clicks on my id there , it says page not found . but when someone clicks on questions it comes to that page at SO and someone can again find me
    – Mirage
    Commented Apr 18, 2011 at 4:17
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    Right, that's exactly what I'm saying. We have no control over those sites, and nothing will change even if you delete your account.
    – Cody Gray
    Commented Apr 18, 2011 at 6:48
  • Chances are your company won't find you simply from one obscure email id used in sample code. They would have to be specifically searching for you in order to find that, most likely. Keep in mind that the "Internets" is a big place.
    – jmort253
    Commented Apr 18, 2011 at 7:00

3 Answers 3

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Once you put something on internet, it is very hard to delete later on.

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It is still remains in post revision history, data explorer, data dump, and at all the site that duplicate the contents, and search engines' cache.

and you may think gravatar picture is not related, actually gravatar image can validate your email address like this

enter image description here

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    Very true, one have to think twice before posting private information.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Apr 18, 2011 at 6:54
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There are couple more things you can do, apart of deleting the question.

  • Disassociate the question from your account, which is explained in How do I disassociate a question with my account? and even better than just deleting, as even high rep users and moderators can't know who posted it. The end result is something like this:

  • Edit out the sensitive/private information then flag your own post and ask a moderator to redact the other revisions. This way you don't need to delete the question or disassociate it, whatever information you don't want to be exposed will be gone forever. (Redact means hard delete.)

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  • Thanks @Jason forgot about it, edited. And yes, ordinary moderator can do that too for a while.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented May 25, 2017 at 19:07
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You'll probably need to email [email protected] and see if they're willing to do a hard delete. Mods are going to be unlikely to delete it because the presence of multiple answers means valuable content, and in any case, 10k users would still be able to see it. The dev team, however, who are the ones at the other end of that email, are able to remove the email from that post and make it look like it was never there.

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    That's true. But they can't remove it from all of the third-party sites that index Stack Overflow, nor from the data dumps.
    – Cody Gray
    Commented Apr 18, 2011 at 6:48
  • @Cody Yes, but the fourth comment on the question makes it sound like the OP doesn't care that much about other sites, and the question may not yet be in a data dump or SEDE, depending on when the OP realized his blunder.
    – waiwai933
    Commented Apr 18, 2011 at 6:51
  • I will email the team , but if they can't delete it , can they migrate only that particular question under new user so that even if someone sees that , he can't see my other questions posted. i don't care about that particular code , the problem is i don't see all other things i have asked on SO . so i want to remove my reference from that question
    – Mirage
    Commented Apr 18, 2011 at 8:00
  • The team can permanently delete old revisions, @Mirror. So, if it is just in the history, then removing the old revision (from Stack Exchange sites) seems quite easy.
    – Arjan
    Commented Apr 18, 2011 at 9:55
  • The problem is not history , the problem is external site link to that question , which will reveal my SO profile
    – Mirage
    Commented Apr 18, 2011 at 10:22

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