Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Deletion of user account

soflow.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 117 posts

Re: Deletion of user account

#101

Post by bee_rider »

dannyw wrote: post #41
Longhanks wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really not trying to be devil's advocate here, but the company is based in Switzerland, and neither Switzerland nor UK are in the EU.

If you offer something to EU residents, you have to comply with GDPR. Even if you are not part of the EU.

You can break a country’s laws depending on whether or not you are ever going to go to that country, or what treaties your country has signed which might cause it to enforce other countries’ laws.

These GDPR conversations tend to pointlessly go back and forth on this because one side is describing the GDPR from the point of view of: what does the law say? The other is looking at it from the point of view of: I only have to follow my country’s laws.

The latter is closer to correct in some technical sense; laws have finite jurisdictions. But the EU has a big market and so lots of entities play ball with them, to some extent, in general, so it is probably better for most people to comply.

Re: Deletion of user account

#102

Post by Huppie »

NikkiA wrote: post #85
DaSHacka wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for this? I remember people talking about it being possibile for them to do (and now redact.dev even replaces old comments with randomly-generated sentences) but I don't recall them being caught actually doing it.

It's a 'misunderstanding' of how reddit works. It turns out that you can't delete comments from subreddits that are private without the required posting permission flag. So when subreddits went 'dark' during the protest, and then people deleted their comment history, the messages on the dark subreddits came back when the protest ended and the subreddit became public again. At that point you can just delete the commen…

An 'unfortunate bug' with deleting comments they told me when I asked them about my full comment history (edited to be empty and subsequently deleted) being restored. Many of those subreddits did not participate in the protests.

Re: Deletion of user account

#103

Post by Huppie »

DaSHacka wrote: post #74
malfist wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean they literally undeleted content deleted during the third party app protest

Do you have a source for this? I remember people talking about it being possibile for them to do (and now redact.dev even replaces old comments with randomly-generated sentences) but I don't recall them being caught actually doing it.

I can confirm it happened to me. I edited + deleted all my comments and checked my comment history before deleting my account a few days later.

A week later (after my account was deleted and inaccessible) my full comment history was restored.

Reddit's official response is that it was 'an unfortunate bug' and there's nothing they could do.

Re: Deletion of user account

#104

Post by n2d4 »

derelicta wrote: post #56

Considering its a company established in Switzerland, and that by Swiss law you have the right to informational self determination, as in you have the right to correct/delete data about you (to some extend ofc), I'd say its grossely illegal

Company location does not matter for this — if you sell goods internationally, you must obey consumer laws wherever you sell them, instead of wherever your business is located

Re: Deletion of user account

#105

Post by ethanholt1 »

This has to be illegal, right? There’s no way this is allowed. It can’t be legally or morally correct to hold someone’s data, and when asked to remove that data from your servers via account deletion, ask for 20 dollars. Adobe does this too, and I feel that subscription based models and hypermonetization is going to become more and more common in the next 10 year.

Re: Deletion of user account

#107

Post by Longhanks »

vidarh wrote: post #83
Scarblac wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switzerland is part of the EU Internal Market through the EEA though and therefore has to implement many laws like this. It just doesn't have a say in them.

Switzerland isn't in the EEA either as they rejected EEA membership in a vote in '92. Instead they have a weird patchwork of bilateral treaties that are designed to look pretty much like EEA membership if you squint just right, and look like just bilateral treaties in separate areas if you squint a bit differently. They're linked, and at least the first seven have a "guillotine clause" so they all cease to apply if o…

I don't know what point you are trying to make with your snark, but bilateral treaties are much easier to alter or cancel if one party so desires, and public opinion in Switzerland is that they were definitely the right choice and the way to go forward. They are actively being negotiated.

Re: Deletion of user account

#108

Post by Scarblac »

Longhanks wrote: post #107
vidarh wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switzerland isn't in the EEA either as they rejected EEA membership in a vote in '92. Instead they have a weird patchwork of bilateral treaties that are designed to look pretty much like EEA membership if you squint just right, and look like just bilateral treaties in separate areas if you squint a bit differently. They're linked, and at least the first seven have a "guillotine clause" so they all cease to apply if o…

I don't know what point you are trying to make with your snark, but bilateral treaties are much easier to alter or cancel if one party so desires, and public opinion in Switzerland is that they were definitely the right choice and the way to go forward. They are actively being negotiated.

And opinion in the EU is that it was a mistake they never want to make again. Far too complicated to negotiate 100 or do separate treaties.

Re: Deletion of user account

#109

Post by vidarh »

Longhanks wrote: post #107
vidarh wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switzerland isn't in the EEA either as they rejected EEA membership in a vote in '92. Instead they have a weird patchwork of bilateral treaties that are designed to look pretty much like EEA membership if you squint just right, and look like just bilateral treaties in separate areas if you squint a bit differently. They're linked, and at least the first seven have a "guillotine clause" so they all cease to apply if o…

I don't know what point you are trying to make with your snark, but bilateral treaties are much easier to alter or cancel if one party so desires, and public opinion in Switzerland is that they were definitely the right choice and the way to go forward. They are actively being negotiated.

The point is that it was constructed largely as a convenient a fiction intended to mollify the Swiss electorate after they voted no to the EEA, as the bulk of the "separate" bilateral treaties can't be separated, altered or cancelled without all of them being canceled by the guillotine clause, as Switzerland has already found out once, so there is no difference in the difficulty of cancellations, for example - you cancel one thing, and everything unravels in either case.

They are actively being negotiated because both Switzerland and the EU have realised there's a need to reform the original treaties, and the EU for a decade now have insisted that anything replacing them need to be closer to the EEA agreement, while having made clear they're not doing this crazy thing again for anyone else.

Re: Deletion of user account

#110

Post by Longhanks »

vidarh wrote: post #109
Longhanks wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what point you are trying to make with your snark, but bilateral treaties are much easier to alter or cancel if one party so desires, and public opinion in Switzerland is that they were definitely the right choice and the way to go forward. They are actively being negotiated.

The point is that it was constructed largely as a convenient a fiction intended to mollify the Swiss electorate after they voted no to the EEA, as the bulk of the "separate" bilateral treaties can't be separated, altered or cancelled without all of them being canceled by the guillotine clause, as Switzerland has already found out once, so there is no difference in the difficulty of cancellations, for example - you ca…

Well, judging by how incredibly many EU citizens emigrate to Switzerland, which is directly caused by the bilateral treaties, there's certainly interest from both parties to negotiate. Switzerland also pays raw cash to the EU as part of the deal.

I'm not sure how long the EU can afford to further alienate countries that pay net positive into it's wallet, after losing the UK and the continuing rise of euroscepticism.

Post reply on HN