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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

How do they still have all this data? Under GDPR (yes, it's European, I know) after a reasonable amount of time (=14 days) you gotta delete all the PII out of the logs. Does US law really allow storing mostly irrelevant logs for so long, and who pays for storing them?

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When you make a comment you are acknowledging that you are entering information to form part of the public record. I've not examined the specific FCC form but I would almost guarantee it clearly explains that your comment and likely metadata around it are protected in some ways by the Privacy Act of 1974 and explicitly not protected in other ways.

These logs could form the basis of a legal record generated by the executive branch of the government and even if they weren't they are likely subject to a legal hold as a result of on-going legal action.

Records in the government sense are very important to form an open trail of policy decisions and overall function of government. Deleting them accidentally can get you a firm slap on the wrist while deleting them intentionally can put you in legal trouble (and worse if you're doing it to cover-up wrongdoing).

The National Archives (NARA) holds on to all the various records generated by the functioning of the federal government for various time periods based on the content of the records. As to payment - costs are incurred in part by the generating agencies and then the taxpayers funding NARA.

Further reading: Privacy Act of 1974, [1], FCC's Comment Filing System System of Records in the Federal Register [2], Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 (more towards only collecting necessary info), and FCC's Website Notices [3].

[1]: https://www.archives.gov/about

[2, Word .doc]: https://www.fcc.gov/omd/privacyact/documents/records/FCC-CGB...

[3]: https://www.fcc.gov/general/website-notices

> When you make a comment you are acknowledging that you are entering information to form part of the public record. I've not examined the specific FCC form

I have since I actually submitted a comment on this very rulemaking. Your description is correct.

Only if you have no legitimate reason to retain it, under the gdpr. Which isn’t relevant here anyway as the US (outside California) doesn’t have anything similar. In this case, the rules require a period of public comment. You could argue whether the IP address is relevant to this public comment, but there’s at least an argument that it is (in this case the concern is that a lot of the public comment may be fake).

Even in countries implementing the gdpr, I’d expect that metadata is retained in this sort of usecase.

They very soon will no longer have this data. Unexpected massive data loss is scheduled to happen in the coming days.

IPs and headers are not PII. The GDPR does not apply outside of the Eurozone.

Are non US citizens even allowed to comment legally?

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