Currently, if your accounts are associated there's a button to let you disassociate them.

![Clear All Associations button](https://i.stack.imgur.com/v0oSn.png)

I really think we ought to kill this feature. Its pretty worthless as is and adds a lot of (error causing) complexity to account management.

But first, some numbers since we all love data.

On Stack Overflow, **206** users have disassociated their accounts and remained unassociated (0.1% of >1 rep users). Only 2,588 have ever disassociated their accounts.

This is not a terribly popular feature.

And what's the point? To hide your behavior on other sites\*?

There is a lot of complexity making this possible at all, and it would be much simpler\*\* to just treat "related accounts" as associated without an explicit association step. It would also eliminate [some](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/88223/wordpress-account-not-showing-up-on-stackexchange) [recurring](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86044/no-mathematics-account-listed-on-stackexchange-com) [issues](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/87731/network-profile-doesnt-list-all-accounts/87733).

To be clear, I'm **not** suggesting a policy of "if you have accounts on two sites, they must be associated." Just that if you signup with the same OpenId on two sites, they would be; you would remain free to use distinct identifiers and retain distinct accounts.

So, are there any good reasons for the disassociate button to remain around? Or is it finally time to kill it?

\*Protip, doesn't work since moderators can see some of your "related accounts."

~~\*\*One of the grand simplifications would be being able to treat "once associate" as "always associated," which would let us kill some ugly GUIDs. Network account links, for example.~~

\*\*On further reflection, it'd actually be simpler to just always do a lookup by identifiers; so disassociation would remain possible by changing ids, but your accounts would need to actually be disjoint in terms of identifiers.