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Comment by ThePhysicist | Hacker News Reader

I think most of the larger forum software providers have implemented functions to comply with GDPR (i.e. delete, restrict and extract user data).

Concerning backups: If you have a short turnaround time (e.g. 14 days) it shouldn’t be a problem, the legislation acknowledges the fact that deleting data and ensuring data integrity (also in accordance with GDPR) are sometimes mutually exclusive from a practical point of view. You need to make sure that deletion requests also get honored when restoring from backup though, so ideally you want to store the requests in a third system and check them when you restore backups.

Concerning the democratic aspect of participating in the online world I think GDPR actually helps, as before it was not possible to reliably get your own data deleted, rectified or transferred, which is not very democratic either IMHO.

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>Concerning the democratic aspect of participating in the online world I think GDPR actually helps, as before it was not possible to reliably get your own data deleted, rectified or transferred, which is not very democratic either IMHO

This is where the GDPR has really helped me. I posted a comment on a blog critical of a government data sharing initiative. Nothing illegal, or questionable - it was a simple two sentence opinion comment which I posted under my real name. I didn't stop to think for a minute that it would cause me any problems.

It did. I discovered that I couldn't get to work on any government projects because when a background check was carried out on me, the above comment was found and according to Revenue (the gov agency responsible for such checks) it indicated that I was hostile to the governments IT plans.

I asked the blog owner (same country as me) to please remove the comment, they refused. So I submitted a right to be forgotten request to Google to stop the blog post appearing in searches for my name.

Ireland? In Ireland, civil servants are not allowed to express political affiliation or opinion, so rather than it being a case of "we don't like what you said", it would be a case of "you said something political, and it persists."

I'm not sure if the contract for Revenue is exactly the same as the civil service, but I would presume on this front it is very similar.

Yep.

There have been three occasions where the IT contracting firm I was working for sent me to work on government IT projects as a contractor. None of them were for Revenue, but it is Revenue who do these checks for all other departments. On one occasion my employer managed to pull a few strings to get me on the project (DSP), on the other two I was told no government work for me (HSE and DoT).

On one of the three three occasions I was forwarded an email from Revenue that said "he expresses a desire for personal privacy that indicates he would be unwilling to fully embrace the governments data sharing strategy".

I did write to a few news outlets about this, none were interested. Even the ICCL wasn't interested, which really surprised me.

> I discovered that I couldn't get to work on any government projects because when a background check was carried out on me, the above comment was found

Well, that's kind of Orwellian.

The GDPR facilitated your gov's ability to censor you (via coerced self-censorship in this case).

Thank you for your thoughtful response and information. I need time to digest this information to see how it affects my opinions, which might take longer than the half life of this discussion, so my apologies in advance for probably not responding :-)

Lots of software has functionality most users can't use.

You might as well tell them that compilers can provide the functions necessary to comply.

> Lots of software has functionality most users can't use

If you are using software to process my personal data, and you don't know how to do that while protecting my personal data, then I'd like you to stop using that software right away.

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