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.
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).
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.
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.