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Then for the threads to be preserved, the content should remain, but the associated username should just be changed. I imagine if HN created an account with th
by MerelyMortal 4y ago
Then for the threads to be preserved, the content should remain, but the associated username should just be changed.
I imagine if HN created an account with the username "DELETED" or similar, that a script could just change comment ownership from the account to be deleted to the special "deleted" account - that would be the easiest to implement as well as keep thread continuity.
(Don't delete the comment just delete the connection to the user.)
- philwelch 4y agoThat still doesn’t account for the stylometry.
- MerelyMortal 4y agoYes it does, not everyone gets a unique "deleted" account. Everyone's comment gets attributed to a single special "deleted" account.
- Operyl 4y agoThe problem still remains: HN’s “API” is incredibly simple and people have full datasets downloaded locally for every comment. In this case, the OP is already out of luck if he’s looking for anonymity against a hostile entity.
- MerelyMortal 4y agoThat problem seems like an extreme outlier. Such user protection would prevent "crimes of opportunity". The average person is not going to have a constant backup of HN in case one day they might want to spy on someone's past.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoAnd if they do, they're likely to start with Twitter or Facebook - something useful against more of the population. HN users are still very much a minority.
- Operyl 4y agoThe problem doesn’t appear to be that much of an extreme outlier, the thread poster is concerned about a specific tool. That tool has already downloaded the complete data set, he’s already lost.
- MerelyMortal 4y agoAnd there's no guarantee that service will stay around, or that they won't accept requests. I still think it's worthwhile to reduce the attack surface.
- naniwaduni 4y agoNothing going forward can help in that case, but we can still weigh impact on other threat models going forward.
- juancb 4y ago"We refuse to help because it's a mild inconvenience to us and we'll justify it by assuming that it won't help without knowing for a fact that it won't." That's a fascinating stance that you've outlined and that others have parroted. A stance that HN has implied with the reply to OP.
- Operyl 4y agoI’m not in charge of anything at HN, so how can my statement say HN won’t do something?
- sparky_z 4y agoNot completely. For example, if the analyst has a large corpus from someone's main account to build up a profile, it seems plausible to me that they could identify individual comments under the "deleted" user as being written by the same person using a throwaway account, especially if they have a distinctive writing style.
- someweirdperson 4y agoI doubt a single post provides a sufficient amount of information for that.
- someweirdperson 4y agoOr a different deleted_user_<random or hash of post> for every post. But as the sibling post says... it doesn't solve anything.
- philwelch 4y agoSo you run the stylometric analysis on each comment to cluster them into inferred user profiles.
- MerelyMortal 4y agoI'm okay with someone attempting to do that. I imagine it would be extremely fuzzy and not successful.
- matrix_overload 4y agoIt does if the content from ALL deleted users gets merged under the same metauser. Stylometric average of all deleted users' comments is pretty useless.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sparky_z 4y agoI don't have a good suggestion here, but I have to point out that that does not fully address OP's stated concern about the use of text analysis techniques to figure out who wrote what, even if the username is different. (It does probably make those techniques more difficult since it would mix comments together from multiple authors under the "deleted" username, but it doesn't fully remove the danger.)
- MerelyMortal 4y agoIf you took all the sentences out of all of the books in a library, and mixed the sentences together under one fake author name, I think it would be impossible to correctly attribute 99.99+% of the sentences to a correct author. I think that is sufficient.
- sparky_z 4y agoBut we're not going to delete everybody's account and mix them all together, are we? If I took a bunch of "minor" writing and mixed it together under one fake name name, but some of it was written by a famous author under a pen-name, then yes, in theory it could be possible to identify those.
- MerelyMortal 4y agoOkay, 1% of the library. I see threads here every-so-often asking about deletion, and I imagine there are more people who would like the opportunity but already know the answer and doesn't ask.
- aliqot 4y agoCurious what happens when an HN user inevitably wants their dead-name changed but retain their history, and whether that would be a harder path to march than being deleted for privacy reasons.
- MerelyMortal 4y ago
- chinathrow 4y agoI disagree. If a user asks for their comment to be deleted, then the right thing to do is to delete them. Period.
- andybak 4y agoI respectfully disagree that it's always the right thing to do. Outside of issues of safety, I think the balance shifts. Safety issues are a different matter of course
- pbhjpbhj 4y agoWhat makes it the right thing to do?
- chinathrow 4y agoJust imagine yourself in the position having something to be deleted posted by an earlier you and/or about yourself. If people ask nicely, can confirm ownership/authorship of the record/data in question, then why would you be in a position to deny such a request?
- fsflover 4y agoYou imply that the (unconfirmed) harm to the individual is more important to avoid than the harm to the society done by removing potentially insightful comment thread. Why is that?
- chinathrow 4y agoNot sure - but your question implies that there is harm to the society done, and from your first part of the sentence, isn't that also unconfirmed?
- fsflover 4y agoI think it's clear that removing discussions from HN harms everyone, because there are many interesting ideas here.
- chrisandchris 4y agoProbably web.archive has indexed one of your posts _before_ your account name changed to DELETED, so your change will be useless. The internet never forgets.
- MerelyMortal 4y agoPossibly, it doesn't hurt to try to reduce the attack surface though. A lot of the stuff I wrote on old popular, public websites (that still exist) can no longer be found via search engine, and I did not take any action, it just disappeared on its own.
- shagie 4y agoYou can take the possibility out of it when you look at Google's big data. It's not a question of "if it exists out there" or "how often it is updated if it exists out there." https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combinator/hacker-news https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi... is updated daily.
- MerelyMortal 4y agoThere is no guarantee that copy will always be available or that they won't remove data. Just because there happens to be a copy already, doesn't mean that the original can't be removed to prevent others from making copies in the future.
- counttheforks 4y agoThen you send them GDPR right to be forgotten requests next. Alternatively, HN can force them to delist to the content.
- Zababa 4y agoIt does actually. At least once a month I go on an multiple hours long quest to find an old thing, and frequently I can't find it.
- altairprime 4y agoSo long as the account is permanently locked from ever participating again in any way, I think renaming is great. Otherwise it needs to be left as-is. But the comments need to remained owned by the account that created them, so that we can consider the history of each commenter when reviewing their comments in the future. Merging them all into DELETED inappropriately coalesces those histories. I feel for those who are just now realizing that they can be located by their stylistic tendencies. It’s Dejanews all over again.
- threatofrain 4y agoThen someone might use an archived version from the trivially scrapable API to recover the information. This is a site for hackers after all.
- jll29 4y agoIt should not be ONE account, or it wouldn't be possible to distinguish individual users in a conversational thread from one another: DELETED_USER: I agree. DELETED_USER: No, that's BS. DELETED_USER: He has his point. Better would be: DELETED_USER_1: I agree. DELETED_USER_2: No, that's BS. DELETED_USER_3: He has his point.
- Zababa 4y ago4chan, that's usually fully anonymous, has on some boards threads IDs. You can see that this is the same perso in that thread, but can't link it to another person in another thread.