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Ask HN: Why does Facebook respect my data more than HN?

• zck 13y ago
  The common advice for this and many similar issues with hn is to email pg and ask him to delete your account, unban you, or give you a pony. Whether you consider this an acceptable solution is another question.
  • pallandt 13y ago
    I imagine pg has more pressing matters to deal with. Better email info@ycombinator.com instead if you need something deleted. A YCombinator employee confirmed to me recently that this is the address to contact in case you absolutely have to, so it obviously shouldn't be abused.
    • pavs 13y ago
      I think there are other admins besides PG. I don't know who they are or how many there are.
• andymoe 13y ago
  Perhaps because it's just not a widely asked for feature. You used to have to email pg if you forgot your password and needed it reset. Are there a large number of people all the sudden clamoring to delete their accounts?
• xerophtye 13y ago
  Uh wait, FB lets you actually delete your stuff? Since when? From what i understand, the best they do is make it invisible to u and to ppl u know.
  • petrosagg 13y ago
    You could always permanently delete your account on Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/help/www/224562897555674 https://www.facebook.com/help/www/224562897555674
    • richo 13y ago
      My understanding was that despite "permanently deleting" if you go back and sign up it'll all magically restore.
      • petrosagg 13y ago
        No, that's only if you "delete" your account through the settings menu. If you fill out the form in the link it's permanent.
        • RomanA 13y ago
          I believe he is referring to that if you delete your account, it will appear deleted. However, you can sign in again during some specified "grace" period to undelete it.
  • evincarofautumn 13y ago
    Deletion actually works, and in pretty much the way you’d expect of any site. Graph relationships that touch users are required to be deletable. Once deleted, there may be a record that an item existed and what type it had (post, comment, etc.) but the actual content is gone. Try downloading your data sometime from Account Settings—it’s fun to play around with.
    • pbreit 13y ago
• quesera 13y ago
  I consider HN respectful of my personal data by not asking for it, and respectful of the community by not allowing commenters to alter historical conversations, beyond a short pragmatic time window. There's a line that needs to be drawn, and no matter where you draw it, you will find some people on one side and some on the other. HN gives you more choice and freedom than Facebook (or G+), by allowing pseudonymity -- you just can't change your mind later. Some people get a lot of professional and personal mileage by having their real name (or well-known pseudo) attached to HN content. Others actively avoid that. And a lot of people do both -- some simple analysis on HN comments can demonstrate multifurcation of single legal identities.
• taspeotis 13y ago
  > Why does Facebook seem to be more accommodating than HN when it comes to giving me the freedom to access my own data? Presumably for the same reason that Eric Lippert gives for why certain nice and intuitive language features aren't implemented in C#: someone has to implement them. For HN to have Facebook-grade privacy controls and account management, someone would have to write that code.
  • krapp 13y ago
    I don't think it would take "Facebook grade" anything to enable deleting or deactivating accounts.
• rmrfrmrf 13y ago
  > I don't mean for the tone of this submission to be confrontational Pretty hard to believe considering a title like, "how do I delete my HN data?" would have been more informative as to the post's content and would have made far fewer assumptions, not to mention it would avoid the inherent negative bias you have toward Facebook. We need to stop promoting passive aggressive content like this. The author easily could have e-mailed site staff before taking up the pitchfork, and we developers know that a feature like account deletion doesn't just appear out of the blue -- it takes time to code. There's no need to paint HN as intentionally disrespectful of our privacy.
  • debugunit 13y ago
    Perhaps a different title wouldn't have been upvoted sufficiently to get us all reading about and discussing the issue. It strikes me there's a strong element of direct marketing in getting from the New page to the front page. Once you're on the front page, of course, your content speaks for itself.
• pg 13y ago
  There's not just one sense of something being someone's data. The comments people make here are part of public conversations with other people, like in a newsgroup. There's a different sense of something being someone's data in a situation like that than there is in, say, Google Docs. Imagine one of those collaborative drawing programs in which multiple users can make marks and the resulting drawing is the sum of all their marks. Should one of the users be able to come back later and claim that he wanted all the marks he'd made deleted, on the grounds that they were "his content?" I'd argue that someone doing that would be violating an implicit social contract with the other users. Similarly, if someone wanted all their HN comments deleted, they'd ruin other people's comments by making them incomprehensible. And how far would deletion be expected to go? If user y quotes part of a comment by user x, is that also supposed to be deleted if x wants his comments deleted? It should be if it's "his personal data," right? We do delete individual comments and submissions when people do something they worry will get them in trouble. That combined with the fact that accounts are anonymous and that users can wipe their profiles seems to me to strike the right balance.
  • onedev 13y ago
    > Imagine one of those collaborative drawing programs However this isn't a drawing board, this is a message board where people discuss various topics. I think reddit handles this situation well in that the content isn't deleted but the "name" associated with the content just shows up as "[deleted]".
    • toomuchtodo 13y ago
      But with reddit, you can also roll through every last comment you ever wrote and delete them (as it should be; you own the copyright to those comments): Reddit History Wiper http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/111025 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/111025
      • lalalalalalala 13y ago
        You have granted Reddit a perpetual license to them though, so they can keep them if they want > you agree that by posting messages, uploading files, inputting data, or engaging in any other form of communication with or through the Website, you grant us a royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, enhance, transmit, distribute, publicly perform, display, or sublicense any such communication in any medium (now in existence or hereinafter developed) and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and to authorize others to do so. ^Reddit copyright policy
• jheriko 13y ago
  i expect everyone to abuse my data to the maximum extent possible in their own best interest. judging from the general tone around here most people take a much more naive approach. just learn to know better and get on with it...
• accountoftheday 13y ago
  The simple answer is that this perceived benevolence is forced upon Facebook anyhow, having a substantial presence in the EU and being subject to data privacy laws there. On the pg side of things I can only assume the chilling effect on conversation works as intended.
• superuser2 13y ago
  When you write something and publish it on the public internet, it ceases to be your personal data. Discussion on a public forum becomes part of the public record and you are not entitled to alter it. If you remember 1984, one of the first things that tells us we are in a dystopia is that Winston's job is to alter and delete from the historical record to suit his employer's purposes. Once you've voluntarily made something public, editing or deleting it is, in a sense, depriving the public of its right to know. As far as accounts, deleting an account is largely symbolic. You are not entitled to be humored - if you don't want an account anymore, stop using it. The only personal data HN has is your email address, which is optional - you are free to remove it from your account at any time.
• zokier 13y ago
  Another thing I'd love to have while we are discussing data would be a way to download all of my own comments. I guess I could scrape the threads page, but an API would obviously be nicer.
  • dangrossman 13y ago
    https://www.hnsearch.com/api https://www.hnsearch.com/api
• dutchbrit 13y ago
  If you want to post something anonymously, at least HN doesn't force you to use your real name so what is the problem? Sure, you might want to delete something after x months. But you can't delete it from the internet. Think about Google Cache, Archive.org etc...
• buro9 13y ago
  There's a real conflict here between the expectations of individuals and the expectations of the group. The individuals are usually told via user agreements that the content is theirs, and that they own their comments and data and are personally liable for the content of them. That is... if you libel someone, this is your problem. And the group expects that once a collaborative work has been created (a conversation), that the work will stand in it's original form. And that implies that when others post a comment within the context of some greater conversation, that the context for their comment is preserved. Therein is the conflict. If an individual deletes (physically removes) their data (we did tell them it was theirs), the collaborative work is affected and the context of everyone else's contributions is changed. To resolve this nearly all fora work on the basis that you can nuke your account but not your comments. And if you do nuke comments, that you can only nuke a subset of them and that a marker will be left to indicate that a comment once existed. This works about as well as you imagine, it pleases no-one fully and everyone just a little. The alternative that is also taken by some fora is to have your contributions licensed in such a way that the operator of the site has a perpetual right to reproduce the content. Great... the group gets their value, but you've lost control of your content whilst still being liable for it. And who is liable for a comment that now shows up with a [deleted] author? Likely as not, it's the site operator. Everything on comments is just a shade of grey in this conflict zone. When it comes to accounts. I fully agree with you. The account isn't a collaborative work, and it is solely your work. The vast majority of fora allow account deletion by policy, but the software tends to not have caught up with the policy. Meaning you have to email the site owner and ask for deletion. On the sites I run (mostly vBulletin, some XenForo, a few Vanilla) I do deletions within a week or two of being notified. As the software doesn't support undeletion I tend to warn people and give a cooling-off period until a confirmation from the person is received to acknowledge it's an irreversible action. I'm rambling... gist is: deletion of comments would affect the collaborative work that is the essence of a forum and should be managed with extreme caution by the site owner and attempt to leave things in context. Deletion of user profiles has no such impact and should be honoured, but unfortunately the buttons to achieve this tend not to be built into the underlying software. And on a final note, I think systems that support aliases should be allow people to rename themselves too. But that's an even less-supported thing than profile deletion. Forum software sucks, but it's not all the fault of software most of it comes from the social stuff surrounding a collaborative work.
• Qantourisc 13y ago
  I'd say: they don't respect your data more here's why: You have no personal data stored in your account settings. Some stuff you post on FB is supposed to be private, HN post are all public. Because they are public, they probably have been replicated quite a few times on internet archives. Unlike FB, HN has no tracking tools (well not on the client side anyway), unlike FB which tries to track you everywhere on the internet. Deleting your account is cumbersome to implement: how to deal with your comments, and would these need to be deleted too ?
• jasonkester 13y ago
  It's generally a good practice to not put things on the internet that you don't want to be on the internet. Follow that, and you'll find that the inability to delete an entire account is not a problem you need ever face.