There are many questions going back on HN itself and the answer had always been no, but from what I understand they have renamed a few accounts. But it isn't something that they will apparently do for everybody.
Personally I don’t think I will ever want to delete my HN account because I’m just some random dude, but I think it should be possible to at least delete your profile and leave your comments/submissions orphaned. Reddit does it.
I do hope people eventually come to the conclusion that everyone says regrettable things on occasion so they can stop digging through endless archives of comments and posts looking for dirt. I feel this is a huge component of why people want deletion.
I don't think that's going to happen until society agrees that such digging is universally immoral. Until then, people are going to listen when the results are publicized.
HN also has a pretty benign sign up process (i.e. relative to most sites, you don’t really give out any infomation, you don’t even _have_ to confirm an email).
I think people feel differently towards HN because HN treats people differently. (Just my 2 cents)
The term "double standard" means two standards are applied to two different things (or group of things) when the differences between the two things are irrelevant to the standard. "You're not allowed to play baseball because you are a girl, but your brother can because he is a boy" is a double standard because gender has no relevance to playing baseball.
Whether a site should programmatically allow the deletion of accounts/comments is surely related to how they handle the collection and pursuit of PII. HN quite obviously is not the same as Facebook in that regard, and unlike the baseball example, that behavior is relevant to the standard being applied.
That said, I could get behind a mechanism where a user can, one-time, change their username, with the effect of disabling their account forever. This would allow people who use their real name[0] as their username to change it to something pseudonymous, without allowing some of the less social behavior a more open name changing system would allow.
[0] - I'm not the 'real' Clark Griswold. Sorry. :)
My view is that HN should have a clearly stated, and effective, account and content deletion process, and that it's a shame and embarrassment it doesn't.
It applies to:
1. Processing that takes place in the context of processors and controllers that are in the Union, regardless of whether or not the processing itself takes place in the Union.
2. Processing the data of subjects who are in the Union by controllers or processors who are not in the Union if the processing is related to offering goods or services to such subjects in the Union or the processing is related to monitoring the behavior of such subjects that takes place in the Union.
One of the recital elaborates on offering goods or services to subjects in the Union, and that includes this:
> In order to determine whether such a controller or processor is offering goods or services to data subjects who are in the Union, it should be ascertained whether it is apparent that the controller or processor envisages offering services to data subjects in one or more Member States in the Union. Whereas the mere accessibility of the controller’s, processor’s or an intermediary’s website in the Union, of an email address or of other contact details, or the use of a language generally used in the third country where the controller is established, is insufficient to ascertain such intention, factors such as the use of a language or a currency generally used in one or more Member States with the possibility of ordering goods and services in that other language, or the mentioning of customers or users who are in the Union, may make it apparent that the controller envisages offering goods or services to data subjects in the Union.
I'd guess that HN would argue that they are not in the Union, so don't fall under #1, and not monitoring behavior, so don't fall under the second prong of #2, and that they did not envisage offering goods and services to people in the Union, getting them out of the first prong of #2.
There's a whole world outside of Europe, which does not follow European law.
I guess that means all sites, except HN.
Excuse me, but what information are you referring to? user: 0xfffafaCrash created: October 6, 2014 karma: 203
This information? That was all I, as a fellow user, could see. Rest of the information is not public.
GDPR is about personal data and extra data (metadata) that is used for non-essential business needs like marketing, so user can ask to remove that extra data. But if the data is required for the entity to do business and by law you can't expect it to be deleted. Like you can't demand some e-commerce site to delete all your order information and associated delivery addresses, phones, contacts, you can however ask them to remove the account, so you lose access to orders and they in theory can't associate it with you anymore, or at least use to build profile on what your buying habits are.
So you can't demand (under GDPR) from HN to remove your data, maybe remove account but handle is not personal data so it is a stretch.
FWIW, this is something HN has to fix, if you ask me.
Imho there's still a massive difference between "potentially personally identifiable" and running a whole business on identifying people and selling that information as Facebook or Google does.
Reddit is a weird middle-ground: Afaik they don't make a business out of selling ad targeting profiles as Facebook or Google do. But due to Reddit's nature with subreddits for even the weirdest of interests, they do have massive potential for it.
In the big picture, subreddits are not that different to Facebook groups surfacing preferences on all kinds of topics, thus analyzing a Reddit users post history [0] and subreddit preferences (u/leansbot) can also give quite a good profile about somebody.
HN couldn't even compete with that if it tried, HN is pretty much just one big main forum where certain topics simply don't get discussed, as such users don't even have the opportunity to surface personal preferences about them, compromising their own privacy.
People often say things that have useful information in them?
The first Usenet posts of Linus regarding Linux, or of Mike Godwin's coinage of Godwin's Law come to mind.
The question of how to determine cultural relevance is a hard one. Ordinarily, say, social utterances or discussions wouldn't qualify. If a participant or subject of that discussion ends up in a socially-significant role (high office, head of a major company, etc.), that might change.
Contexts vary, and can change over time.
At the same time, records are lost with time, there is a forgetting curve, and a few high-water marks stand out, though even those crumble in time.
Looking at HN's top-ever stories is an interesting exercise (either Lists or Algolia's search w/o any terms should give this).
Somehow this problem didn't really exist in forums in the 2000s.
By whom?
There's always a danger of falsely claiming a double standard when in fact you're just trying to judge one community by the standards of another.
Reddit has a lot of that stuff and their geeky subreddits have the same amount of complaints of FB as HN. There likely is some overlap of users as well. And most likely overlap of the sort of users. There’s no standard being applied at reddit.
Like everything else people most people won't do what they should unless they absolutely have to.