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Comment by powvans | Hacker News Reader

It looks like the maximum fine is 4% of annual revenue... seems like the regulation has no teeth if you have no revenue. IANAL and could be totally wrong.

To your point about small companies, I agree, it feels onerous.

What irks me about the right to be forgotten is that it directly counters my right to remember things. Should a shop keeper be allowed to record their observations about who enters their store each day? If they maintain a physical guest book in their brick and mortar store, does a visitor have a right to be erased from that book?

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> It looks like the maximum fine is 4% of annual revenue... seems like the regulation has no teeth if you have no revenue.

Up to €20 million, or 4% annual global turnover – whichever is higher.

The fine is up to 20M euro or 4% whichever is greater AFAIK.. and will match the seriousness of the offence. ie a small side project who refuses to honour a forget me request is highly unlikely to be fined 20m euro. However, one that deliberately mines the web for huge amounts of PID without consent and profits from it now has a new regulation to watch out for.

Re the last question, yes, absolutely. Why would data format matter?

I don't think it matters to the principle, but rather to the practicality. It's now practical to aggregate massive amounts of data and create a privacy concern that's unlikely to have existed in the world of offline records.

The principle is freedom of speech. If you tell me that I cannot write down the names of the people who came to visit me today without their permission, you are violating my right to freedom of speech.

If you need to retain information for a particular reason, for example to provide a service, or to retain for legal reasons, or legitimate reasons in connection with your business, then in many cases that will trump the right to be forgotten. See Art 17(1)(a).

Yes, for privacy reasons, it’s not appropriate to keep observations on your fellow citizen...

Dear diary, today I had a discussion on HN with tajen.

Will HN support erasing your comment history if you ask?

If you're a European citizen, in a couple of months they'll legally have to (assuming they don't want to just ignore any European court judgements, which is possible but risky).

I believe you can already delete your account and comments though?

Plus Hacker news doesn't ask for personally identifyable information in order to use it, unless you choose to put your full name in as a user.

HN has everyone's email.

With modern language usage analysis it would probably not be too difficult to work out who everyone is on HN who posts regularly. This is one of the reasons I post under my real name.

HN only has email addresses for members who provide it. It's not a requirement for account creation.

So what is the procedure going to be exactly? Will HN request the user to send over a photo of their national ID card or password to prove EU citiznship and then proceed to delete comments and data?

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