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Ask PG: I'd like to delete my account.

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask PG: I'd like to delete my account.

#31

Post by jacquesm »

authentic wrote: post #30
jacquesm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So ? Europe != NL. And even if, a subsidiary incorporated independently is not going to be liable for acts of the parent company unless they are actively engaged in the same activity. And in this case they would not be, Ycombinator owns and runs the forum, that startup does its own thing.

you misunderstood. it can be argued that once YC has established a sufficient nexus within a particular country it can be held to its laws (in this case, DE data protection and privacy laws which are far stricter than those of NL, afaik). on a much larger scale, watch for the impending fight between the EU commission and facebook about this very issue.

No, you misunderstood the law.

A startup funded by YC would never ever be seen as a subsidiary.

Google NL BV can be held to the law with respects to google.com, but some start up that google funds will never be used to hold google.com to NL law.

Re: Ask PG: I'd like to delete my account.

#32

Post by authentic »

jacquesm wrote: post #31
authentic wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you misunderstood. it can be argued that once YC has established a sufficient nexus within a particular country it can be held to its laws (in this case, DE data protection and privacy laws which are far stricter than those of NL, afaik). on a much larger scale, watch for the impending fight between the EU commission and facebook about this very issue.

No, you misunderstood the law. A startup funded by YC would never ever be seen as a subsidiary. Google NL BV can be held to the law with respects to google.com, but some start up that google funds will never be used to hold google.com to NL law.

Not at all saying the subsidiary would be held responsible here (they are not operating the website in question anyway), it does however affect the question whether the parent is conducting significant business in a particular country. Whether this is practically enforceable (like the UK libel judgement against Arrington personally) is a different matter.

For me personally, pg acting on account and data deletion requests would simply be an act of courtesy that we can expect from him.

Re: Ask PG: I'd like to delete my account.

#33

Post by jacquesm »

authentic wrote: post #32
jacquesm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you misunderstood the law. A startup funded by YC would never ever be seen as a subsidiary. Google NL BV can be held to the law with respects to google.com, but some start up that google funds will never be used to hold google.com to NL law.

Not at all saying the subsidiary would be held responsible here (they are not operating the website in question anyway), it does however affect the question whether the parent is conducting significant business in a particular country. Whether this is practically enforceable (like the UK libel judgement against Arrington personally) is a different matter. For me personally, pg acting on account and data deletion requ…

> Not at all saying the subsidiary would be held responsible here (they are not operating the website in question anyway),

Good, because the answer to that is clearly 'no', but

> it can be argued that once YC has established a sufficient nexus within a particular country it can be held to its laws (in this case, DE data protection and privacy laws which are far stricter than those of NL, afaik).

Suggested clearly otherwise, so it looks like you have changed your stance on that.

> Whether this is practically enforceable (like the UK libel judgement against Arrington personally) is a different matter.

Arrington was personally liable, which is a completely different thing than the one you are talking about right now.

> For me personally, pg acting on account and data deletion requests would simply be an act of courtesy that we can expect from him.

I disagree with you.

A free, online forum is exactly what it seems, a place where your opinion can be expressed and will distribute your opinion to strangers.

Expectations like this is what drives the weird terms-of-service that many websites have, the overhead on the kind of activity deployed and the income generated from that preclude manual intervention on behalf of every Tom, Dick and Harry that decide they want to rewrite history after the fact. Besides it being simply a lot of work.

If you do not want your words to be stored in an online service, do not put them there in the first place.

Fora are especially important in that they serve as means of communication, in effect you are asking to be able/allowed to retract your statements after any arbitrary period of time.

If that were to be actually enforceable the only thing that would change would be the terms of service, getting you to agree explicitly with the giving up of that particular right since it completely renders the whole forum concept moot.

Every thread topic ever started by a user that requests to delete their content, every answer to every comment they ever wrote would suddenly stop making sense.

news.yc gives you an hour after you post to retract your words, if you do not wish to make use of that right then it lapses, which I think is a really nice medium between the two worlds.

Re: Ask PG: I'd like to delete my account.

#34

Post by Confusion »

authentic wrote: post #22
Confusion wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A real name has to go, but there is no requirement to remove a nickname or an account.

regulation outside the US may not apply here but this is not how the law works in the EU, which deals with the data itself rather than just identification. not too long ago I compelled a telco who had pissed me off to send me a 200 page dump of all the data they had about me and subsequently delete all of it, using the legal system after they had initially refused.

Not on online forums where you need to agree with a halfway decent User Agreement before you can open an account. You grant the forum copyright on your posts. There is, for instance, no way to get your posts removed from Anandtech's forum, if they don't want to. You get them anonimized at best.

Re: Ask PG: I'd like to delete my account.

#35

Post by jrockway »

authentic wrote: post #30
jacquesm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So ? Europe != NL. And even if, a subsidiary incorporated independently is not going to be liable for acts of the parent company unless they are actively engaged in the same activity. And in this case they would not be, Ycombinator owns and runs the forum, that startup does its own thing.

you misunderstood. it can be argued that once YC has established a sufficient nexus within a particular country it can be held to its laws (in this case, DE data protection and privacy laws which are far stricter than those of NL, afaik). on a much larger scale, watch for the impending fight between the EU commission and facebook about this very issue.

Consider this. You serve YC with papers in Europe. They don't show up to the trial. Now what?

(Hint: the US is not going to extradite pg for not deleting your HN account.)

Re: Ask PG: I'd like to delete my account.

#36

Post by xiaoma »

jacquesm wrote: post #29
xiaoma wrote: post #25

Considering how even non-personal information becomes identifiable in aggregate, this is a feature that any social site with a conscience should have. Otherwise, the risk to privacy is both impossible to gauge and continuously growing.

Or, alternatively you could simply think about the consequences of what you write before you write it. ANY words you write on the internet or even in email start to have a life of their own right after you hit that 'reply' button. If you're the kind of person that would not stand by their words even years later then you probably shouldn't be clicking that button. It saves others work down the line, and it saves you e…

I think you've missed the point I was making. The consequences are unknowable at the point of writing. The ability to search, organize and analyze data has grown and will continue to grow.

Online practices that were downright conservative in 1997 would expose personal details today. Similarly, what is safe now, likely won't be in the future as data from even more sources gets correlated.

"ANY words you write on the internet or even in email start to have a life of their own right after you hit that 'reply' button. If you're the kind of person that would not stand by their words even years later then you probably shouldn't be clicking that button."

This idea is ridiculous. People can't be expected to never change their minds and email users clearly have an expectation of privacy. Perhaps a few odd characters would happily "stand by their words" and share their email histories with the world, but the vast majority of us would not.

Re: Ask PG: I'd like to delete my account.

#37

Post by jacquesm »

xiaoma wrote: post #36
jacquesm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, alternatively you could simply think about the consequences of what you write before you write it. ANY words you write on the internet or even in email start to have a life of their own right after you hit that 'reply' button. If you're the kind of person that would not stand by their words even years later then you probably shouldn't be clicking that button. It saves others work down the line, and it saves you e…

I think you've missed the point I was making. The consequences are unknowable at the point of writing. The ability to search, organize and analyze data has grown and will continue to grow. Online practices that were downright conservative in 1997 would expose personal details today. Similarly, what is safe now, likely won't be in the future as data from even more sources gets correlated. "ANY words you write on the i…

You have it backwards :)

Because you can not know the consequences at the time of writing you have to think ahead and not write stuff that you think you might regret in the future.

If wishes were horses then beggars would ride, you can wish for a way to undo stuff you said in the past but in practice it will only get harder to do that in the future.

More and more frequently the second you hit 'submit' your content is syndicated all over the globe. I pose that it is impossible to even know who copied down your words and where and when they'll pop up in the future, you should write with that in mind.

The law is a decade behind reality, it has never been any other way with technology. You may be legally in the right and you may have certain expectations but that will not make much difference.

Witness Jimmy Wales trying to wipe out the fact that he owned a porn site, in his profile it says (on wikipedia no less) euphemistically that 'bomis targeted males', but everywhere else ( http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/12/69880 ) for instance it is clearly visible that it was.

The facts stand by themselves, no amount of handwringing or wishing is going to make that any different.

If you don't want to be confronted with your own words in the future, don't write them and if you don't want to be confronted with your own actions in the future, don't do them.

There is no undo button on email to begin with, and no, you can't have a reasonable expectation of privacy there because you are sending your words to someone else.

Who can then choose to make your words public.

Re: Ask PG: I'd like to delete my account.

#38

Post by jacquesm »

jrockway wrote: post #35
authentic wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you misunderstood. it can be argued that once YC has established a sufficient nexus within a particular country it can be held to its laws (in this case, DE data protection and privacy laws which are far stricter than those of NL, afaik). on a much larger scale, watch for the impending fight between the EU commission and facebook about this very issue.

Consider this. You serve YC with papers in Europe. They don't show up to the trial. Now what? (Hint: the US is not going to extradite pg for not deleting your HN account.)

You will be able to serve but the court does not have standing, in spite of what the BUMA did with the pirate bay guys, which was a travesty of justice if there ever was one.

Unfortunately they didn't have the best of lawyers from what I've seen.

Suit has to be brought in the local court of the defendant, that's a pretty strong rule there and the lawyer seems to have failed to capitalize on that, instead concentrating on whether the serving was done properly.

By doing that he shifted the argument from one of 'standing' to one on whether they had had proper notice, implicitly acknowledging standing.

Re: Ask PG: I'd like to delete my account.

#39

Post by authentic »

jacquesm wrote: post #33
authentic wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all saying the subsidiary would be held responsible here (they are not operating the website in question anyway), it does however affect the question whether the parent is conducting significant business in a particular country. Whether this is practically enforceable (like the UK libel judgement against Arrington personally) is a different matter. For me personally, pg acting on account and data deletion requ…

> Not at all saying the subsidiary would be held responsible here (they are not operating the website in question anyway), Good, because the answer to that is clearly 'no', but > it can be argued that once YC has established a sufficient nexus within a particular country it can be held to its laws (in this case, DE data protection and privacy laws which are far stricter than those of NL, afaik). Suggested clearly oth…

I have not changed my stance on anything.

Do not make deletions out to be more work than they really are, as others have mentioned the suppression of content from a particular account is already implemented to combat spam. Anyway, deletion of particular message is technically the same as allowing edits after 1hr with a fixed replacement text (such as "[deleted by user]").

User-triggered account "deletion" would be a trivial addition instantly obviating recurring, tedious discussions like this. Even Google lets you retract your submissions from their usenet archives and Groups in a simple way.

There are many valid reasons why a user may wish to have their messages removed that override the interest of forum integrity.

No right lapses after one hour since there is no permanent license grant for user submitted content to HN in the first place (lack of TOS). The copyright of entries remains with the user.

Re: Ask PG: I'd like to delete my account.

#40

Post by authentic »

Confusion wrote: post #34
authentic wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

regulation outside the US may not apply here but this is not how the law works in the EU, which deals with the data itself rather than just identification. not too long ago I compelled a telco who had pissed me off to send me a 200 page dump of all the data they had about me and subsequently delete all of it, using the legal system after they had initially refused.

Not on online forums where you need to agree with a halfway decent User Agreement before you can open an account. You grant the forum copyright on your posts. There is, for instance, no way to get your posts removed from Anandtech's forum, if they don't want to. You get them anonimized at best.

a user agreement cannot override statutory rights.
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