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Comment by wjy | Hacker News Reader

One possible justification would be it distorts the reality of what actually happened in the past. It alters conversations by removing a speaker, creating a hole.

I'm not judging you one bit. I don't know which sites you were referring to, and you're clearly taking the nice-guy approach. But there are arguable reasons to not remove content just because someone is embarrassed of their past self.

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If someone asks for their account to be removed from a website there are places where you are obliged by law to comply. I live in such a place. But I don't remove their data because I'm obliged by law, but simply because I think that people should own their own creations, and should have the ultimate say over what happens to them, unless they explicitly created something as work for hire and got compensated.

Let's take two different examples: facebook vs HN.

If we're looking at facebook then someone would have a really good case to have their account and all data associated with it removed if they asked for it. In some places that would be legally enforceable.

In the case of HN I think the contributions are woven in to the site so strongly that other peoples stuff would be negatively affected. In such a case I would propose to anonymize the writer.

This avoids the embarrassment but leaves the fabric largely in tact.

Yes, I am not judging you either, but it could very well be too expensive, technically difficult or perhaps even damaging to your business (for example by reducing the other users' benefit) to remove data. I was just curious.

Also I wonder if in the future lawmakers will put mechanisms into place that regulate information and give individuals the right to have their records deleted.

> Also I wonder if in the future lawmakers will put mechanisms into place that regulate information and give individuals the right to have their records deleted.

That's already happened in some places.

http://www.jurofoon.nl/nieuws/weblog.asp?id=3039

(Dutch).

The hard part is how do we verify that the records were actually deleted. Is the info still sitting on random backups somewhere. It seems that once it is out there, it will be very hard to put back in the box again. Personally that concerns me.

Yes, that's a real problem. I'd wager that many companies have no idea whatsoever where all the copies of your data have gone.

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