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Tell HN: Hacker News will not delete my account – is that legal?

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11–20 of 29 posts

Re: Tell HN: Hacker News will not delete my account – is that legal?

#11

Your position is understandable, and it is an important reminder when participating in this forum; your comments (and their contents) will be burned into the history of the site after the two hour edit window, followed by being ingested into various datasets and archives globally. What you make public is forever. In the US, I am unaware of any legal recourse you might have ("right to be forgotten"), and would suggest…

> If people try to doxx you, report them to the police without hesitation for harassment (and enhancements, if your local jurisdiction specifically outlaws doxxing). I cannot stress this enough.

I don't know who these people are, but it's 99% certain they don't live in the same country as I do.

I can't see how reporting this to my local little police force will do anything.

Re: Tell HN: Hacker News will not delete my account – is that legal?

#12
Ycombinator is a California business, and may be subject to CCPA/CRPA laws or those like them, possibly conditional on whether the account-holder is a California resident or not. Similarly, if the account-holder is an EU resident, I would imagine they have certain rights that they could seek to have exercised. Notably, you may or may not have the right to demand wholesale deletion of user-generated content, which is necessarily distinct from YC-managed PII, which for example might include your account's private email address. In all of the above cases, YC is likely within their rights to require you provide your legal identity, legal address of residence, and/or proof of citizenship of the protected region applicable.

However, if you can highlight specific IRL information that is considered Protected under those laws even though you voluntarily submitted it as UGC, such as your legal name, then you should request having that specific Protected information redacted within a given comment, but you'll need to be specific about which characters in which comments need to be redacted – a regular expression / expectation of work shifted to YC is an incomplete request in that regard. Were you to make a complete and specific request of specific redactions to be made to specific comments — I recommend using a double-quoted tab-delimited file with three columns: comment ID, unmodified comment, all redactions fully applied comment, and plaintext human description of redaction(s) performed — then I expect your redaction request would be evaluated by the site administrators without requiring any invocation of legal counsel or threats. Note that this is not a suggestion that you "replace entire comment with ~~~", this is a suggestion that you "replace the specific characters of PII in your comment with ~~~, leaving the rest of your comment intact". Note that I reviewed your past ~40 days of public comments and I see zero instances of possibly-protected PII.

If at any point an attempt to exercise legally-permitted rights is refused, then your only recourse is to hire a lawyer or seek one be hired on your behalf by an organization such as the EFF. You should probably be seeking legal counsel rather than posting for free legal advice on an internet forum, and I expect the first thing a lawyer is going to think (whether they say it or not) when presented with your posts and comments is to wonder why on earth you did not seek legal counsel sooner.

I empathize with your concern, but having lived through Dejanews doing this twenty-five years ago to all of Usenet (look up "X-No-Archive: Yes" for how the community reacted) and then having to get my old posts purged from Google's dataset purchased from Dejanews, Your realization about what you should and should not share publicly is one that Usenet as a whole pieced together decades ago, but was forgotten in the current generation's rush to participate in social media. Welcome to the "all my words for all time are searchable and no one will purge them from their full-text search indexes" crisis of thirty years ago, metastasized into individual sites rather than one big Usenet conglomerate feed.

(I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice. I am not associated with YC or HN.)

Re: Tell HN: Hacker News will not delete my account – is that legal?

#13
Hey, I follow you on Insta, it's a surprise to see you here.

I guess HN "rules" are not written in stone and it wouldn't hurt if they make an exception for your case. You've been polite and have a very valid reason behing such petition.

Hopefully @dang/HN would yield on this one.

Re: Tell HN: Hacker News will not delete my account – is that legal?

#14

Ycombinator is a California business, and may be subject to CCPA/CRPA laws or those like them, possibly conditional on whether the account-holder is a California resident or not. Similarly, if the account-holder is an EU resident, I would imagine they have certain rights that they could seek to have exercised. Notably, you may or may not have the right to demand wholesale deletion of user-generated content, which is…

Thanks for the detailed reply, I appreciate it

Re: Tell HN: Hacker News will not delete my account – is that legal?

#15

It seems that the CCPA requires companies to delete your data upon request. You could file a complaint to the California attorney general. They may investigate and fine the offending entity. If you want to take matters into your own hands you can view your comments and selectively delete the ones you want down. Keep in mind that copies of hacker news content will have been scraped and archived elsewhere.

The assertion that "CCPA requires companies to delete your data upon request" is not technically correct. What must be deleted is "personal information" and while I empathize with the notion that would include social media posts, I am not sure it actually does include them.

see: https://privacy.ca.gov/protect-your-personal-information/wha...

The closest thing mentioned is: "Contents of messages (e.g., emails, texts, chats)" but does that actually cover posts? I'm not sure and I can't find an authoritative answer that it does.

Re: Tell HN: Hacker News will not delete my account – is that legal?

#17

It seems that the CCPA requires companies to delete your data upon request. You could file a complaint to the California attorney general. They may investigate and fine the offending entity. If you want to take matters into your own hands you can view your comments and selectively delete the ones you want down. Keep in mind that copies of hacker news content will have been scraped and archived elsewhere.

>If you want to take matters into your own hands you can view your comments and selectively delete the ones you want down.

Nope. Everything older than 1 or 2 hours is stored permanently, with no way to edit or delete.

Re: Tell HN: Hacker News will not delete my account – is that legal?

#18
post #14

Ycombinator is a California business, and may be subject to CCPA/CRPA laws or those like them, possibly conditional on whether the account-holder is a California resident or not. Similarly, if the account-holder is an EU resident, I would imagine they have certain rights that they could seek to have exercised. Notably, you may or may not have the right to demand wholesale deletion of user-generated content, which is…

Thanks for the detailed reply, I appreciate it

(There are certain complication with a TSV that, instead, a tarball of orig/comment_id.txt and redact/comment_id.txt files would be more likely to provide a rapid response; not the least of which because it doesn’t require any CSV or database software and because they can trivially export the same comment IDs and review diffs using any stock Unix-ish system.)

Re: Tell HN: Hacker News will not delete my account – is that legal?

#19
post #10

It seems that the CCPA requires companies to delete your data upon request. You could file a complaint to the California attorney general. They may investigate and fine the offending entity. If you want to take matters into your own hands you can view your comments and selectively delete the ones you want down. Keep in mind that copies of hacker news content will have been scraped and archived elsewhere.

> You could file a complaint to the California attorney general Does it matter if I'm not in California? (or even the USA?)

If YC’s processing of information fails to comply with the laws governing YC, a business operating in California, then certainly a report of mishandling is presumably of interest to California functionaries. Whether or not that is the case is something you’d have to evaluate using California law and a direct knowledge of the PII or PII-alike in question.

Re: Tell HN: Hacker News will not delete my account – is that legal?

#20

Your position is understandable, and it is an important reminder when participating in this forum; your comments (and their contents) will be burned into the history of the site after the two hour edit window, followed by being ingested into various datasets and archives globally. What you make public is forever. In the US, I am unaware of any legal recourse you might have ("right to be forgotten"), and would suggest…

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