> It seems the ico is at odds with the EU here: No, just keep reading on: On appeal, the Regional Court of Berlin (the "Kammergericht") ruled that IP addresse

> It seems the ico is at odds with the EU here: No, just keep reading on: On appeal, the Regional Court of Berlin (the "Kammergericht") ruled that IP addresses in the hands of website operators could qualify as personal data if the relevant individual provides additional details to the website operator (e.g., name, email address, etc.) in the course of using the website That's basically the same thing as the John Smith example: There's a threshold when you have personally identifying information, and whilst it can certainly include an IP address in some circumstances, there are enough other valid uses for the IP (fraud, VAT, etc) and enough uncertainty (NAT, multiuser computers, etc) that it by itself isn't PII. > There's a provision on right to be forgotten, and it'll be interesting to see that vis-a-vis a public interest in keeping an open archive of public discourse. Yes. I don't think it's clear what Internet forums are required to do. The ICO has some pretty good guidance here: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/individual-rights/right-to-erasure/ https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-da... and the ICO has previously weighted in on how they interpret erasure: https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1475/deleting_personal_data.pdf https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1475/de... so a flag to hide all the comments of a user who has chosen to be forgotten should be sufficient. However, if a site wants to refuse the order, they may be successful if they can argue the comments are in the public interest, but if I were a company wanted to refuse a persons rights in this way, I would call the ICO to get clarity. > I don't think that'll be enough to comply with the GDPR. If someone contacts the data controller (e.g. pg) and asks to have their data removed (or flagged hidden or whatever), and Pg does it, why don't you think that would be compliant?