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Comment by nprateem | Hacker News Reader

> If you request deletion of your Hacker News account, note that we reserve the right to refuse to (i) delete any of the submissions, favorites, or comments you posted on the Hacker News site

Probably not GDPR-compliant then if comments can be deanonymised by LLMs.

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This is probably the worst piece of policy on whole HN. It has a evil feel to it. If HN wasn't so interesting/valueable, this would be the single reason NOT to use it at all.

All these comments live forever in HN datasets that people download anyway

Why take away people's choice to use a forum with permanent comments? I know my comments will be here forever, but so will other people's comments. That's what makes HN valuable.

The alternative is what you see on reddit. A lot of threads from the past have posts deleted or overwritten with some script. You now have to dig through archive sites to find the comments, and you usually do find them.

I participate in Signal chats with self-destructing messages, too. But I post different things here and on Signal, under different usernames. Heck, after a few weeks I'll make another account here, anyway.

Even if you somehow deanonymize me, it's a risk I willingly took when I started posting.

Finally, if you go after HN for deleting comments, will you go after the many archive sites?

My understanding is that the GDPR “right to be forgotten” applies to personal data. Are publicly available comments considered personal data?

Well, the username attached to them would surely be.

If they can help to deanonymize you, they must contain something personal. Writing pattern are pretty personal, certain spelling errors too, or the choose of words.

Absolutely anything relating to an anonymous person could help deanonymization, so that implies that anything relating to any person is personal data. Is that the GDPR’s position?

From ico.org.uk: “ It is important to note that opinions and inferences are also personal data, maybe special category data, if they directly or indirectly relate to that individual”

From gdpr-info.eu: “ Subjective information such as opinions, judgements or estimates can be personal data.”

So yes. HN is in violation of the GDPR. I had already filed a complaint about this policy at my local GDPR authority.

If you are posting public comments, then these comments are available publicly... like, what did you expect!?

Yes they are. The GDPR doesn’t say you can’t post it.

Under article 17 of the GDPR, EU citizens have the right to be forgotten, in which case this data needs to be deleted.

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