[Cartwright2]

Before deleting your account you should edit out and overwrite as much information as possible. Things like your name, e-mail, and any other fields should be falsified before deleting. You have no way of knowing if their "delete" mechanism just flips a deleted bit or if it actually erases your data.

The problem, in this case, is that the company might notify your employer that you're making those changes. Not sure what I'd do in this case. It might be worth creating some dummy accounts to see what actions actually trigger notifications.

[nathancahill]

It flips a delete bit. But here's the bigger problem: your pages return a 404 error page with status code 200, so Google takes a long time to clear them from their cache (real 404s clear semi-instantly).