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Comment by mark-r | Hacker News Reader

If you don't have a system in place to automatically cleanse user-submitted content, you have a liability. The chilling effect this has will only grow over time.

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What about HN? Their response to deleting comments is halfway between the thumb and the pinky.

Yikes, that's false and not nice. We delete comments for people nearly every day. It's true that we don't allow wholesale deletion of account histories, because that would gut the threads the account had participated in. But we also don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN.

The idea is to balance the need to preserve history (community interest) and the need to protect users (individual interest). We don't get there perfectly, but I can tell you for sure that the vast majority of people who ask us about this end up happy with how we help them.

My understanding of the policy matches the parent comment from communications I've had. Is this a recent policy change?

I'm not sure what law that's included in, but it's not part of GDPR.

Might be the copyright reform, but comments should still be fine with that.

Not sure why this is being downvoted. "If you don't have a system in place to automatically cleanse user-submitted content, you have a liability" is indeed not part of GDPR as far as I know, nor does it seem to be the reason why the comments weren't migrated.

Probably referring to "right of erasure"? If you want to delete your comments, but there is no mechanism for that, then Microsoft may be in violation of that part of GDPR.

Yep, I said as much in another comment. The downvoted comment I replied to was still right -- the issue preventing MS from migrating comments doesn't appear to be liability due to a lack of filters, which isn't even part of GDPR.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19457322

It could be that I'm confusing it with something else, it's hard when everything is named with meaningless acronyms. But I really thought it was something to do with GDPR even if the connection isn't immediately obvious.

You are thinking of Article 13 (the upload filter), which hasn't been passed yet. Not to be a pendant, but an initialism cannot be meaningless almost by definition -- it has to mean something otherwise it wouldn't be an initialism. GDPR means the "General Data Privacy Regulation".

FWIW, I completely agree with you on the chilling effect of upload filters. But upload filters aren't part of GDPR by any stretch of the imagination.

If I write a comment and my name is bryanrasmussen and then later I want to delete any data that can be publicly linked to me then I suppose a comment written with my name on it might count.

It also might not.

It might be worth it to some company to determine which it is, but who would expect that company to be Microsoft?

The GDPR doesn't say anything about requiring automated systems do do any of this. The volume of erasure requests is so low that I doubt it would even be worth it for Microsoft to invest in such a system.

MSDN comments still exist and Microsoft operates several forums. Perhaps GDPR is a questionable excuse for some lazy sysadmin not wanting to migrate comments, but it doesn't fly here.

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