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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

The official channel to complain about this is the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). https://ico.org.uk/

I'm not expecting it to be speedy or effective. Another channel is writing a formal letter requesting your GDPR rights to deletion on paper, to the UK business address https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...

We all know that online support is a waste of time. In some ways, HN is one of the actually effective support channels.

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From my anecdotal experience of 1 attempt of writing to the ICO it was 100% effective: several months later I received a polite response with a history of communication between ICO and the organisation I complained about, where the latter had to justify what they were doing. This was a sports organisation that originally announced that they would be putting DOB of the athletes on their public profiles, but ultimately was just the age (because there are age bands in competitions) maybe as a result of my complaint - who knows?

Thank you for this. I'm going to do so now

You may wish to contact compliance and inform them that they are violating legal requirements in the UK (assuming that this is, y'know...true). Without blustering or yelling (getting angry makes you look less credible), simply state the government agency that accepts complaints, and state that you will file a complaint if the matter is not resolved. If there are laws that mandate how fast Google is required to resolve the issue, it is worth mentioning them.

In general, support has the incentive of making tickets go away. Compliance has the incentive of making sure the company doesn't run afoul of regulators. Compliance is also much much more powerful at an organizational level.

I've contacted them and they've left my last email without response, and have chosen to ignore all my requests to take down my private information

> Another channel is writing a formal letter requesting your GDPR rights to deletion on paper

GDPR is EU, UK is not. how does this work? surley the UK didn't adopt the GDPR voluntarily?

Same as it always has. It was in place before Brexit.

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/data-protection-and-the...

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2016/679/contents

https://uk-gdpr.org/

The UK incorporated GDPR into our local laws as GDPR UK[0] and the DPA[1]. I don't know whether the punitive measures still hold up though.

[0] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2016/679/contents

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/12/contents/enacte...

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