I’ve never had much experience with Lyft. I have an account and the app’s installed on my phone, but that’s only because one of my credit cards gives me a few bucks a month in “Lyft Cash” (which is sure to become the next world reserve currency!) I don’t use it, though.
My dad, however, did use Lyft on occasion. He passed away last month, and so I’m cleaning up his various internet accounts. Such is the way of things nowadays.
To this point, I’ve only been removing payment methods from most of his accounts (Amazon, Apple, Netflix, that sort of thing). I want to leave the accounts open for the time being in case any unresolved issues arise, or in case I need access to his account history for some reason.
So it was that I went into the Lyft app on his phone, then to payments, and found no delete option for his credit card info.
I checked Lyft’s official site, and it turns out you must have at least one active payment method on your account at all times.
Screenshot for archival purposes, in case they change their policy:
So, if you don’t plan on using Lyft for a while (for example, if you’re going to be temporarily living or studying in a locale where it’s unavailable) you must leave your account chargeable for the benefit anyone that might compromise it while you’re not paying attention.
Seems a bit foolish, and by contrast I checked my own Uber app and indeed they would allow me to delete my sole payment method.
But OK, this isn’t some hypothetical situation where my dad might not want to use Lyft for a while. Not to be obvious, but he’ll never be using it again.
Fine, I’ll just delete his account.
In annoyance I marked up this screenshot for social media, but hopefully you can empathize with my irritation. Allow me to summarize:
- They’ll mayyybe delete all or some of your data but “it like totally depends you guys, and only if we’re like required to by law, but, ya, know, who really cares about privacy rite lol??”
- For some godforsaken reason it’ll take (maybe) up to 45 days to (maybe) respond and finally (maybe) delete [some or all] of the data. I guess they transact this sort of business via The Pony Express and occasionally the couriers die of dysentery and drown in rivers that are too deep to ford.
- They might actually not be able to delete your account at all, depending on some vague status of trust, safety, or fraud. This is completely at their discretion, and they don’t elaborate on what this means.
- The kick in the teeth is that the “data privacy page” where the delete option is located isn’t even in the app. Or, if it is, they buried it so well that I can’t find it. But of course most Lyft customers will only use the app and may or may not have ready access to a computer, or know how to login using a mobile browser (which will almost always kick you back to the app from lyft.com).
- The weird thing is that they say that the request can’t be undone once initiated. I mean, fair enough, but why not? They’re going to retain all of your account data for (probably) 45 days anyhow.
Personally, I find this pretty egregious. Not only is there no guarantee that they’ll even delete any of your data, but they can’t guarantee a time frame in which it would be done (if they did do it).
Anywho, here’s the steps I used to finally (almost) delete his account:
- On your phone, search “how do I delete my Lyft account” in a browser.
- Go past all the AI slop, some of which I found to be inaccurate.
- Find the help page on lyft.com
- The first reference to “our data privacy page” isn’t actually a link. Find the second time that’s mentioned, and it will be a link.
- Clicking the link will prompt you to login to your Lyft account in that browser.
- You’ll need to login with an SMS confirmation code.
- Then you’ll need to login with your email.
- Then you’ll be prompted to confirm you are who the account says you are, and possibly prove you’re a human.
- You’ll see two options to either export your data or delete your account.
- Follow the steps to delete your account.
Couldn’t be easier!
Of course, they shouldn’t make it too easy as you wouldn’t want to delete your account accidentally. But they could put a button in the app like Uber does, to at least make it easier.
Just to see what the exported data looks like, I decided to export my dad’s account data. I don’t really need it, but wanted to familiarize myself with the process and also see what Lyft was actually storing.
That was a mistake.
You can’t delete your account while an active export request is pending.
The problem is, nowhere do they say how long the account export will take. My dad’s account is probably tiny — he had 5 ratings (average of 5.0 stars, btw) — yet it’s been over half an hour now and no alert or email of the data.
I’m aware this is apparently sensible logic, for how could you export the data after it was deleted? Well, they said deletion could take up to 45 days, so maybe I’m the fool for thinking there’s a potential window here. Also, they could allow you to initiate the deletion request and queue the deletion to start after the export is complete.
IMO they just want you hanging on as long as possible, maybe forgetting to go through with the account deletion so that their subscriber count doesn’t go down (which would upset the shareholders). That’s just me putting on the ol’ tinfoil hat of course, no real company would actually behave that way, right?
The capper to all this is that just out of curiosity I looked at Uber’s account deletion instructions:
These are much more straightforward.
Sure, it’s not great that they’ll take 30 days, but they’re also not wishy-washy about whether they can do it and how they might even need an extension on that particular homework assignment.
But there are two important things that they do much better than Lyft:
- There’s a button in the app to accomplish this task, and they even tell you how to find it. (I double-checked; it’s there.)
- During the 30-day deletion period, if you change your mind you can sign back into your account to cancel it.*
* This is a bad thing in the sense that if you’re concern is account compromise, it still leaves your “deleted” account vulnerable for 30 days. It would be better if they had an option to “delete immediately”, especially in a situation like mine where the user may actually be dead.
However, as with Lyft, they are very approximate about what data (if any) in your account will actually be deleted. Note that they say “[..] we may retain certain information about you [..] for legitimate business purposes”. That’s pretty vague.
It is better than Lyft’s statement, though: “[..] we will delete your account and information to the extent required by applicable law”, which implies they’ll only delete the information that they’re legally required to remove, which may be none of it depending upon your jurisdiction.
In conclusion, I opine that Lyft is a really bad actor in this regard, and a brand leader in anti-consumer enshittification.