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Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

> And consumers generally should have the right to delete their data at any time, especially the data they post on the Internet themselves

I'm all for that, but where does it leave community collaborated work when one author wishes to delete their contribution totally?

i.e. wikipedia

One way around this might be to disassociate contributions form the public, to anonymise those contributions. But then... how do you stop spammers and trolls?

If a person has made a contribution under a perpetual licence, then that licence should trump. But if that were the case then everyone would just sidestep this law such that all user contributions were under a for-commercial, shared-forever licence.

Does the law win? Yes.

How would it apply to collaborative works in which data contributed is clearly identified as coming from an author who wants to delete their data? Unknown.

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I don't think a reasonable person would ever claim the technological equivalent of a right of rescission for data contributed to a community-collaborated document. Rather, people are taking exception to unconscionable clauses in the terms of service of Facebook, Google, etc. that effectively grant to each respective corporation a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to "use" any content posted on or in connection with each service. It's the overbreadth of the term "use" that people balk at.

I say if you post anonymously you should get no privacy protection and removal measures are to be decided by the data host. I'd be happy to go with that.

On the other hand, use your real name, and you get the privacy protections.

IANAL, but your Wikipedia contributions wouldn't count as personal information (unless it is explicitly about yourself). However the logging of when and which page you edited are, so those could potentially be affected.

This is about personal information not about creative works.

Besides if you contribute to Wikipedia you have to agree to a license which would obviously trump any privacy measures.

Not obvious.

The data protection laws in Europe are enforcement laws and provide detailed instruction on the enforcement of the treaties that make up the "European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms"... basically what is referred to as just "Human Rights".

As governments and companies in Europe keep finding, no laws trump that EU treaty.

A wikipedia licence won't cut it.

Further the 1995 data protection laws already stated that any data which could identify the person is covered. That definitely includes meta data, hence my comment about needing to disassociate the data to anonymise it. A person can request any identifying information be deleted, including pseudonyms as it's conceivable that a pseudonym used on multiple services is identifying.

Which leaves anonymous contributions to a project... then how can you continue to enforce anti-spam/troll policies when most of the existing methods rely on spotting the spammers/trolls based on signals from IP, user-agent, emails, usage... if you can identify a spammer, then you can identify a person (given access to enough data), and therefore it's identifying.

These new proposals strengthen the existing laws, which are actually already pretty good. I'm basically saying that there is an edge case here, and it could lead to problems. The law being black and white needs exceptions clarified in writing and not left to assumption.

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