How To Cancel/Delete On-Line Account?

All your personal info, wiped or not wiped, will still be accessible by AT&T no matter what. In fact, they will continue to send you promotion Mail even after canceling, so no need. Anyway, back to your question, I believe the online account will not be automatically deleted since it is a way for you to easily re-sign back up if needed. A call to DIRECTV may help in deactivating the login, but I am not 100% sure about this as I have never cancelled DIRECTV and resigned back up to see what happens.

Your info will not be wiped. They must keep record that you were once a customer and reflect your bill and payment history. Sorry but you cannot hide the fact that you once were their customer.

Normally after the account is in a canceled status, you cannot log into your account online. But for someone who chooses to reactivate their service, then the online access is turned back on. If you can still access your account online, either you haven't passed the cancellation date or something is still open.

If you don't want anything more to do with AT&T, then stop contacting them in the first place. You cannot wipe your time with them from existence. Any mailers you might receive with offers to return, just ignore and junk.

Thanks for the replies.  I know I will never get off AT&T's mailing list and will probably still be receiving their junk mail offers long after I am dead.  My concern deals more with the fact that web sites tend to get hacked eventually.  So any entity that I no longer have an active account with (not just AT&T) I would prefer all my personal info be wiped from any 'web site' account, knowing full well the company still has all the info somewhere for its use in perpetuity (and will never actually wipe it from its servers, etc).  Just that removing the info from the 'website' or at least deactivating any website account login might lower the chances of any hacker obtaining access to my info (but probably not).  I know pursuing this with AT&T is probably a total waste of time, but was just wondering. 

The website is accessing those servers, so is never wiped. All that is done is deactivating the login with the updated canceled status. That is pretty much the standard across the board with any company. A true wipe of data is more for a spy movie.

If everything is canceled and you are past the point where the service month has started over, but the login is still active, then something is wrong. You call AT&T and discuss with customer support. Alternatively you file a BBB complaint which goes to the corporate level which usually means AT&T contacts you. Either way, you still must deal with AT&T to resolve.

But again, your online information is not wiped. All they can do is make sure the login is disabled correctly. They are not clowns for not wiping your information completely, as that option doesn't exist.

@Juniper : I appreciate your writing, your knowledge, and your detail.  You are missing @detuch254 's intention here: he wants his private data protected.  If he is no longer doing any type of business with a company, he would like to have his data removed from Online Systems.  Yes, corporations are sometimes regulated and required to host information for some time for legal or tax reasons, BUT that does not mean that they can't remove it from ALL of their online databases.  Copy to offline storage and keep it forever if you want, but remove it from the general population as there is NO BUSINESS NEED for it to remain available, accessible, and stealable.  This is simply laziness on the part of Data Custodian.  
There's no need to defend this reckless behavior: PPI is a big deal, and Data Theft, Data Sales, and Identity Theft is life changing.  Corporations simply don't want to have to take the technical and administrative steps to behave responsibly. 

By the way, DirecTV is one of thousands of companies that act this same way, so don't get defensive.  

@bradlysteele 

Was only a realistic perspective to how this works. If you feel it should be different, file a BBB complaint that sends your concern to the corporate level.

If you have a question or current issue, please start a new thread as this one is close to 3 years since discussion ended.