Can I download my data? No.
Can I delete my data*? No.
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*Yes, GDPR requires the ability to delete data:
https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...
Can I download my data? No.
Can I delete my data*? No.
--
*Yes, GDPR requires the ability to delete data:
https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623799
Sure, he presents some alternative options, that's all good, but at the end of the day, HN refuses to delete personal data.
One day someone with a bone to pick with HN and large enough pockets will test it in the courts. Until then, we must exercise great caution when commenting on HN.
One day that may happen. I hope HN prevails. I'm a EU citizen and a big proponent of GDPR. However, I also believe in the value of the commons, our shared conversations. I consider the mass deletions on one's entire history of comments to a public forum, to be a very selfish act, harmful to society. I'm very much with 'dang here: community and society at large[0] has a stake here, too. Conversations here are part of public record, they contain wealth of knowledge useful to people who find it in the future. It's not that different from Stack Exchange, really. I'd like to believe GDPR would be fine with a more surgical deletion approach, as 'dang proposes, but I guess we'll have to wait for some court to opine on it.
Possibly relevant: I consider this entitlement to have all one's contributions to public boards deleted under GDPR to be the same kind of selfish, antisocial thinking as the whining about LLMs training on one's published Internet comments without attribution (and subsequent desire to delete them, or not to publish anything again on-line). I may be weird, but I don't believe anyone is entitled to all value their labor provides in perpetuity. Society can't function when everyone tries to capture everything for themselves; it works best when people let other use some of the value freely. We need the commons.
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[0] - It's a publicly viewable board, after all.
That thread provide a fairly strong argument that hn would not need to delete comments. All hn would need to do is to annomynize/delete the profile of a user.
I feel pretty strongly that it isn’t the place of a government to police non-critical data (read: things that aren’t financial related).
The GDPR doesn't mean you can delete everything you have written on the Internet wholesale, it means to be forgotten .. and renaming an account is exactly in line with that.
> The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) gives individuals the right to ask for their data to be deleted [...].
This does not mean any data, it only means personal data as described under GDPR. Why is this the case? Because the GDPR is explicit that it only applies to personal data, that's the scope of the whole regulation. I recommend reading the text of the regulation itself, it's fairly digestible. The legal text uses "personal data" throughout to avoid the ambiguity, unfortunately many summaries do not. Article 1 of GDPR:
> 1. This Regulation lays down rules relating to the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and rules relating to the free movement of personal data.
Under specific circumstances. It could be easily argued that deleting comments would fall under the first example of the link you posted -- unless you're a minor.
The GDPR doesn't require any means to download data though, and it is mainly for PII.