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There is double standard favoring HN. If Reddit or Facebook didn't allow you to delete your account or comments and said it wanted to maintain a permanent recor

There is double standard favoring HN. If Reddit or Facebook didn't allow you to delete your account or comments and said it wanted to maintain a permanent record of you, they would get eviscerated. There are many questions going back on HN itself and the answer had always been no, but from what I understand they have renamed a few accounts. But it isn't something that they will apparently do for everybody.

awild 7y ago
There's a major difference between sharing very personal information with close people, and stating your opinions in a public forum. Additionally, hn does not openly collect much metadata etc from your usage. You are right, that this is a double standard, but the sensitivity of the data is very different.
- 0xfffafaCrash 7y ago
  That may be true, but I believe the information hackernews collects is still enough to be potentially personally identifiable. This makes we wonder if the inability to delete here might be at odds with GDPR compliance in the EU.
  - widforss 7y ago
    But YC probably have no ties to the EU, so they can't be held accountable.
    - nathankleyn 7y ago
      GDPR applies to any company that handles the data of EU citizens, regardless of whether that company is located in the EU or not.
      - hdkrgr 7y ago
        EU citizens OR residents
      - whereistimbo 7y ago
        What happen if the non-EU company won't comply? Can EU sue it? Or block its website?
      - tzs 7y ago
        GDPR has little or nothing to do with citizenship. It focuses on presence in the EU, not on citizenship in the EU. See Article 3. It applies to: 1. Processing that takes place in the context of processors and controllers that are in the Union, regardless of whether or not the processing itself takes place in the Union. 2. Processing the data of subjects who are in the Union by controllers or processors who are not in the Union if the processing is related to offering goods or services to such subjects in the Union or the processing is related to monitoring the behavior of such subjects that takes place in the Union. One of the recital elaborates on offering goods or services to subjects in the Union, and that includes this: > In order to determine whether such a controller or processor is offering goods or services to data subjects who are in the Union, it should be ascertained whether it is apparent that the controller or processor envisages offering services to data subjects in one or more Member States in the Union. Whereas the mere accessibility of the controller’s, processor’s or an intermediary’s website in the Union, of an email address or of other contact details, or the use of a language generally used in the third country where the controller is established, is insufficient to ascertain such intention, factors such as the use of a language or a currency generally used in one or more Member States with the possibility of ordering goods and services in that other language, or the mentioning of customers or users who are in the Union, may make it apparent that the controller envisages offering goods or services to data subjects in the Union. I'd guess that HN would argue that they are not in the Union, so don't fall under #1, and not monitoring behavior, so don't fall under the second prong of #2, and that they did not envisage offering goods and services to people in the Union, getting them out of the first prong of #2.
      - msla 7y ago
        The GDPR only applies to entities it can be enforced against. There's a whole world outside of Europe, which does not follow European law.
        jnordwick 7y ago
        There was a post maybe a year ago about GDPR, and the general feeling on HN was the all websites should follow it in principle even if not required by law. I guess that means all sites, except HN.
  - concerned_user 7y ago
    I think you are mixing up right to be forgotten, and GDPR here a bit. Excuse me, but what information are you referring to? user: 0xfffafaCrash created: October 6, 2014 karma: 203 This information? That was all I, as a fellow user, could see. Rest of the information is not public. GDPR is about personal data and extra data (metadata) that is used for non-essential business needs like marketing, so user can ask to remove that extra data. But if the data is required for the entity to do business and by law you can't expect it to be deleted. Like you can't demand some e-commerce site to delete all your order information and associated delivery addresses, phones, contacts, you can however ask them to remove the account, so you lose access to orders and they in theory can't associate it with you anymore, or at least use to build profile on what your buying habits are. So you can't demand (under GDPR) from HN to remove your data, maybe remove account but handle is not personal data so it is a stretch.
    - tobr 7y ago
      Wait, what? You can go back and see all their comments and submissions. That will quite possibly have a lot of PII, but cannot normally be deleted. FWIW, this is something HN has to fix, if you ask me.
      - jefftk 7y ago
        If you send a request to the moderators and cite the GDPR I would expect them to delete it. The GDPR doesn't require the deletion process to be automated.
        tobr 7y ago
        So I guess the Just Delete Me link should be mailto:hn@ycombinator.com?subject=Please%20GDPR%20my%20account
        jefftk 7y ago
        That sounds more accurate than "impossible" does to me
  - freeflight 7y ago
    > That may be true, but I believe the information hackernews collects is still enough to be potentially personally identifiable. Imho there's still a massive difference between "potentially personally identifiable" and running a whole business on identifying people and selling that information as Facebook or Google does. Reddit is a weird middle-ground: Afaik they don't make a business out of selling ad targeting profiles as Facebook or Google do. But due to Reddit's nature with subreddits for even the weirdest of interests, they do have massive potential for it. In the big picture, subreddits are not that different to Facebook groups surfacing preferences on all kinds of topics, thus analyzing a Reddit users post history [0] and subreddit preferences (u/leansbot) can also give quite a good profile about somebody. HN couldn't even compete with that if it tried, HN is pretty much just one big main forum where certain topics simply don't get discussed, as such users don't even have the opportunity to surface personal preferences about them, compromising their own privacy. [0] https://atomiks.github.io/reddit-user-analyser/ https://atomiks.github.io/reddit-user-analyser/
cgriswald 7y ago
> There is double standard favoring HN. The term "double standard" means two standards are applied to two different things (or group of things) when the differences between the two things are irrelevant to the standard. "You're not allowed to play baseball because you are a girl, but your brother can because he is a boy" is a double standard because gender has no relevance to playing baseball. Whether a site should programmatically allow the deletion of accounts/comments is surely related to how they handle the collection and pursuit of PII. HN quite obviously is not the same as Facebook in that regard, and unlike the baseball example, that behavior is relevant to the standard being applied. That said, I could get behind a mechanism where a user can, one-time, change their username, with the effect of disabling their account forever. This would allow people who use their real name[0] as their username to change it to something pseudonymous, without allowing some of the less social behavior a more open name changing system would allow. [0] - I'm not the 'real' Clark Griswold. Sorry. :)
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  The double standard is that the HN hivemind, speaking broadly, demands practices of other sites (Facebook, Reddit, etc.) which aren't provided by HN, and are defended by some users of HN. My view is that HN should have a clearly stated, and effective, account and content deletion process, and that it's a shame and embarrassment it doesn't.
morty_s 7y ago
Maybe. But it (at least) feels like HN sets some different expectations upfront (e.g. not being able to edit a post after a certain amount of time). HN also has a pretty benign sign up process (i.e. relative to most sites, you don’t really give out any infomation, you don’t even _have_ to confirm an email). I think people feel differently towards HN because HN treats people differently. (Just my 2 cents)
- pacala 7y ago
  FWIW, reddit doesn't require to confirm an email, though it employs a plethora of dark patterns to make you believe you have to.
  - stjohnswarts 7y ago
    Yeah it's pretty crappy, but it's not a plethora, you just don't put anything in the "email" text box and click <next>, that's not really a plethora.
jchw 7y ago
I have no skin in this game, but I am tempted to side with you on this one, especially because the replies with attempted justification are actually just showing how weak of a defense there really is. It’s a forum, you post things. It’s not that different from other forums. Personally I don’t think I will ever want to delete my HN account because I’m just some random dude, but I think it should be possible to at least delete your profile and leave your comments/submissions orphaned. Reddit does it. I do hope people eventually come to the conclusion that everyone says regrettable things on occasion so they can stop digging through endless archives of comments and posts looking for dirt. I feel this is a huge component of why people want deletion.
- ColanR 7y ago
  > I do hope people eventually come to the conclusion that everyone says regrettable things on occasion so they can stop digging through endless archives of comments and posts looking for dirt. I feel this is a huge component of why people want deletion. I don't think that's going to happen until society agrees that such digging is universally immoral. Until then, people are going to listen when the results are publicized.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  that really goes against human nature
inimino 7y ago
> If Reddit or Facebook didn't allow you to delete your account or comments and said it wanted to maintain a permanent record of you, they would get eviscerated. By whom? There's always a danger of falsely claiming a double standard when in fact you're just trying to judge one community by the standards of another.
- skinnymuch 7y ago
  By most HN comments. That’s patently obvious if you have been around HN for even a month.
  - inimino 7y ago
    Right. But HN is a public website and not a walled garden. If Facebook were open to everyone with an internet connection and had no direct or private messages or anything secret I think you'd see a similar standard applied there.
    - skinnymuch 7y ago
      I was responding to the “by whom”. Reddit has a lot of that stuff and their geeky subreddits have the same amount of complaints of FB as HN. There likely is some overlap of users as well. And most likely overlap of the sort of users. There’s no standard being applied at reddit.
Aardwolf 7y ago
I hate seeing deleted comments in the middle of reddit threads though. Somehow this problem didn't really exist in forums in the 2000s.
- LocalH 7y ago
  It did to some degree, but it was less visible (often times, such posts would be outright deleted, as opposed to merely having content wiped). Also, it's much more visible on a platform like Reddit, as it's a highly centralized discussion forum.
atomi 7y ago
Contact an attorney and have them make the request. I'd bet it gets done that way. Like everything else people most people won't do what they should unless they absolutely have to.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  On what grounds?
pacala 7y ago
Reddit doesn't allow you to delete your account either. You can only "deactivate" it, to delete posts you have to do it manually. Since the Internet has the attention span of a gnat, I can find no plausible justification to not delete one's contributions automatically. At most, a site may delay the delete by a few weeks out of respect for other users. After that, all conversations have long died and measurably nobody cares. Other than the Twitter cancel mobs.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > Since the Internet has the attention span of a gnat, I can find no plausible justification to not delete one's contributions automatically. People often say things that have useful information in them?
  - pacala 7y ago
    The number of readers of forum comment decays exponentially over time. Is anyone reading years old forum comments looking for insights?
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      Yes.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      It happens rarely, but it happens. The first Usenet posts of Linus regarding Linux, or of Mike Godwin's coinage of Godwin's Law come to mind. The question of how to determine cultural relevance is a hard one. Ordinarily, say, social utterances or discussions wouldn't qualify. If a participant or subject of that discussion ends up in a socially-significant role (high office, head of a major company, etc.), that might change. Contexts vary, and can change over time. At the same time, records are lost with time, there is a forgetting curve, and a few high-water marks stand out, though even those crumble in time. Looking at HN's top-ever stories is an interesting exercise (either Lists or Algolia's search w/o any terms should give this).
    - 7y ago

awild 7y ago

There's a major difference between sharing very personal information with close people, and stating your opinions in a public forum. Additionally, hn does not openly collect much metadata etc from your usage. You are right, that this is a double standard, but the sensitivity of the data is very different.

0xfffafaCrash 7y ago
That may be true, but I believe the information hackernews collects is still enough to be potentially personally identifiable. This makes we wonder if the inability to delete here might be at odds with GDPR compliance in the EU.
- widforss 7y ago
  But YC probably have no ties to the EU, so they can't be held accountable.
  - nathankleyn 7y ago
    GDPR applies to any company that handles the data of EU citizens, regardless of whether that company is located in the EU or not.
    - hdkrgr 7y ago
      EU citizens OR residents
    - whereistimbo 7y ago
      What happen if the non-EU company won't comply? Can EU sue it? Or block its website?
    - tzs 7y ago
      GDPR has little or nothing to do with citizenship. It focuses on presence in the EU, not on citizenship in the EU. See Article 3. It applies to: 1. Processing that takes place in the context of processors and controllers that are in the Union, regardless of whether or not the processing itself takes place in the Union. 2. Processing the data of subjects who are in the Union by controllers or processors who are not in the Union if the processing is related to offering goods or services to such subjects in the Union or the processing is related to monitoring the behavior of such subjects that takes place in the Union. One of the recital elaborates on offering goods or services to subjects in the Union, and that includes this: > In order to determine whether such a controller or processor is offering goods or services to data subjects who are in the Union, it should be ascertained whether it is apparent that the controller or processor envisages offering services to data subjects in one or more Member States in the Union. Whereas the mere accessibility of the controller’s, processor’s or an intermediary’s website in the Union, of an email address or of other contact details, or the use of a language generally used in the third country where the controller is established, is insufficient to ascertain such intention, factors such as the use of a language or a currency generally used in one or more Member States with the possibility of ordering goods and services in that other language, or the mentioning of customers or users who are in the Union, may make it apparent that the controller envisages offering goods or services to data subjects in the Union. I'd guess that HN would argue that they are not in the Union, so don't fall under #1, and not monitoring behavior, so don't fall under the second prong of #2, and that they did not envisage offering goods and services to people in the Union, getting them out of the first prong of #2.
    - msla 7y ago
      The GDPR only applies to entities it can be enforced against. There's a whole world outside of Europe, which does not follow European law.
      - jnordwick 7y ago
        There was a post maybe a year ago about GDPR, and the general feeling on HN was the all websites should follow it in principle even if not required by law. I guess that means all sites, except HN.
- concerned_user 7y ago
  I think you are mixing up right to be forgotten, and GDPR here a bit. Excuse me, but what information are you referring to? user: 0xfffafaCrash created: October 6, 2014 karma: 203 This information? That was all I, as a fellow user, could see. Rest of the information is not public. GDPR is about personal data and extra data (metadata) that is used for non-essential business needs like marketing, so user can ask to remove that extra data. But if the data is required for the entity to do business and by law you can't expect it to be deleted. Like you can't demand some e-commerce site to delete all your order information and associated delivery addresses, phones, contacts, you can however ask them to remove the account, so you lose access to orders and they in theory can't associate it with you anymore, or at least use to build profile on what your buying habits are. So you can't demand (under GDPR) from HN to remove your data, maybe remove account but handle is not personal data so it is a stretch.
  - tobr 7y ago
    Wait, what? You can go back and see all their comments and submissions. That will quite possibly have a lot of PII, but cannot normally be deleted. FWIW, this is something HN has to fix, if you ask me.
    - jefftk 7y ago
      If you send a request to the moderators and cite the GDPR I would expect them to delete it. The GDPR doesn't require the deletion process to be automated.
      - tobr 7y ago
        So I guess the Just Delete Me link should be mailto:hn@ycombinator.com?subject=Please%20GDPR%20my%20account
        jefftk 7y ago
        That sounds more accurate than "impossible" does to me
- freeflight 7y ago
  > That may be true, but I believe the information hackernews collects is still enough to be potentially personally identifiable. Imho there's still a massive difference between "potentially personally identifiable" and running a whole business on identifying people and selling that information as Facebook or Google does. Reddit is a weird middle-ground: Afaik they don't make a business out of selling ad targeting profiles as Facebook or Google do. But due to Reddit's nature with subreddits for even the weirdest of interests, they do have massive potential for it. In the big picture, subreddits are not that different to Facebook groups surfacing preferences on all kinds of topics, thus analyzing a Reddit users post history [0] and subreddit preferences (u/leansbot) can also give quite a good profile about somebody. HN couldn't even compete with that if it tried, HN is pretty much just one big main forum where certain topics simply don't get discussed, as such users don't even have the opportunity to surface personal preferences about them, compromising their own privacy. [0] https://atomiks.github.io/reddit-user-analyser/ https://atomiks.github.io/reddit-user-analyser/

cgriswald 7y ago

> There is double standard favoring HN. The term "double standard" means two standards are applied to two different things (or group of things) when the differences between the two things are irrelevant to the standard. "You're not allowed to play baseball because you are a girl, but your brother can because he is a boy" is a double standard because gender has no relevance to playing baseball. Whether a site should programmatically allow the deletion of accounts/comments is surely related to how they handle the collection and pursuit of PII. HN quite obviously is not the same as Facebook in that regard, and unlike the baseball example, that behavior is relevant to the standard being applied. That said, I could get behind a mechanism where a user can, one-time, change their username, with the effect of disabling their account forever. This would allow people who use their real name[0] as their username to change it to something pseudonymous, without allowing some of the less social behavior a more open name changing system would allow. [0] - I'm not the 'real' Clark Griswold. Sorry. :)

dredmorbius 7y ago
The double standard is that the HN hivemind, speaking broadly, demands practices of other sites (Facebook, Reddit, etc.) which aren't provided by HN, and are defended by some users of HN. My view is that HN should have a clearly stated, and effective, account and content deletion process, and that it's a shame and embarrassment it doesn't.

morty_s 7y ago

Maybe. But it (at least) feels like HN sets some different expectations upfront (e.g. not being able to edit a post after a certain amount of time). HN also has a pretty benign sign up process (i.e. relative to most sites, you don’t really give out any infomation, you don’t even _have_ to confirm an email). I think people feel differently towards HN because HN treats people differently. (Just my 2 cents)

pacala 7y ago
FWIW, reddit doesn't require to confirm an email, though it employs a plethora of dark patterns to make you believe you have to.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  Yeah it's pretty crappy, but it's not a plethora, you just don't put anything in the "email" text box and click <next>, that's not really a plethora.

jchw 7y ago

I have no skin in this game, but I am tempted to side with you on this one, especially because the replies with attempted justification are actually just showing how weak of a defense there really is. It’s a forum, you post things. It’s not that different from other forums. Personally I don’t think I will ever want to delete my HN account because I’m just some random dude, but I think it should be possible to at least delete your profile and leave your comments/submissions orphaned. Reddit does it. I do hope people eventually come to the conclusion that everyone says regrettable things on occasion so they can stop digging through endless archives of comments and posts looking for dirt. I feel this is a huge component of why people want deletion.

ColanR 7y ago
> I do hope people eventually come to the conclusion that everyone says regrettable things on occasion so they can stop digging through endless archives of comments and posts looking for dirt. I feel this is a huge component of why people want deletion. I don't think that's going to happen until society agrees that such digging is universally immoral. Until then, people are going to listen when the results are publicized.
stjohnswarts 7y ago
that really goes against human nature

inimino 7y ago

> If Reddit or Facebook didn't allow you to delete your account or comments and said it wanted to maintain a permanent record of you, they would get eviscerated. By whom? There's always a danger of falsely claiming a double standard when in fact you're just trying to judge one community by the standards of another.

skinnymuch 7y ago
By most HN comments. That’s patently obvious if you have been around HN for even a month.
- inimino 7y ago
  Right. But HN is a public website and not a walled garden. If Facebook were open to everyone with an internet connection and had no direct or private messages or anything secret I think you'd see a similar standard applied there.
  - skinnymuch 7y ago
    I was responding to the “by whom”. Reddit has a lot of that stuff and their geeky subreddits have the same amount of complaints of FB as HN. There likely is some overlap of users as well. And most likely overlap of the sort of users. There’s no standard being applied at reddit.

Aardwolf 7y ago

I hate seeing deleted comments in the middle of reddit threads though. Somehow this problem didn't really exist in forums in the 2000s.

LocalH 7y ago
It did to some degree, but it was less visible (often times, such posts would be outright deleted, as opposed to merely having content wiped). Also, it's much more visible on a platform like Reddit, as it's a highly centralized discussion forum.

atomi 7y ago

Contact an attorney and have them make the request. I'd bet it gets done that way. Like everything else people most people won't do what they should unless they absolutely have to.

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
On what grounds?

pacala 7y ago

Reddit doesn't allow you to delete your account either. You can only "deactivate" it, to delete posts you have to do it manually. Since the Internet has the attention span of a gnat, I can find no plausible justification to not delete one's contributions automatically. At most, a site may delay the delete by a few weeks out of respect for other users. After that, all conversations have long died and measurably nobody cares. Other than the Twitter cancel mobs.

saagarjha 7y ago
> Since the Internet has the attention span of a gnat, I can find no plausible justification to not delete one's contributions automatically. People often say things that have useful information in them?
- pacala 7y ago
  The number of readers of forum comment decays exponentially over time. Is anyone reading years old forum comments looking for insights?
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Yes.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    It happens rarely, but it happens. The first Usenet posts of Linus regarding Linux, or of Mike Godwin's coinage of Godwin's Law come to mind. The question of how to determine cultural relevance is a hard one. Ordinarily, say, social utterances or discussions wouldn't qualify. If a participant or subject of that discussion ends up in a socially-significant role (high office, head of a major company, etc.), that might change. Contexts vary, and can change over time. At the same time, records are lost with time, there is a forgetting curve, and a few high-water marks stand out, though even those crumble in time. Looking at HN's top-ever stories is an interesting exercise (either Lists or Algolia's search w/o any terms should give this).
  - 7y ago