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Comment by k-mcgrady | Hacker News Reader

I’ve seen quite a lot of people complaining about this on Twitter. Is there some negative to this I’m not aware of other than companies losing customers? I’ve come across more and more sites in recent years with no account deletion option and it’s hugely frustrating. One I discover it and manage to shut my account down via a support channel they have lost me for good. There is no way I’m ever becoming a customer again because I can’t trust them with my data if they’re going to hold it hostage. If they’d included the account deletion option I very well may have returned in the future.

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Reddit has been allowing easy account deletion and content deletion for years (since the beginning I believe?) and while I enjoy that freedom, it also makes some old conversations almost impossible to read where [deleted] answers to [deleted] and only one message in the middle of the conversations still there saying "Wow that's really interesting information! Everyone should read that!"

This has even become a way of trolling in some subreddits where you try to make people waste time answering you in detail then deleting all your messages.

This has prompted some people to quote bigger parts of the original message.

Deleting accounts is a right, no problem about it, but deleting public information is really problematic. The right to be forgotten should be a moral right, not a legal one. I don't want it to be illegal to point out politicians responsibilities in Iran-Contra or the Iraq war even 20 years after.

  I’ve come across more and more sites in recent years with no account deletion option and it’s hugely frustrating.

It’s just not something that developers have really had to account for thus far.

You ingest data and then it and derived data goes god knows where in your organization. How do you track all of that down?

(There’s “should be” and “actually is”. I’m referring to the latter.)

At least in Europe with GDPR they, at least legally, had to account for this.

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