> We're always happy to delete or redact identifying information. We don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. We don't do it by allowing wholesale deletion of account histories, because that would gut the threads the account had participated in, which would be unfair to any commenters who replied, as well as to readers and to the community.
> That doesn't mean we don't care about individual users' needs for protection—we care a lot about it, and help people with these requests every day. We just have to do so with sharper tools, and we have a big bag of tricks for taking care of these things. They include renaming accounts, retroactively assigning comments to throwaway accounts, deleting specific posts (especially if they don't have replies), redacting specific info from posts, and more.
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Neither GPDR nor CCPA require the deletion of the account or content contributed that does not fall under personally identifying information.
If there are comments that contain PII, that should be sent to HN. Make sure that it is clear that these are PII that contains information that is directly linking to a real person.
Though as noted, wholesale account and comment deletion isn't required and is disruptive.
I'm aware that accounts get renamed. I've run across a few instances, most recently through my front-page activity analysis. IIRC there are some glitches, possibly with Algolia still referring to the old name, or the old name showing up othewise in some archives.
I also strongly suspect there's an independent (and immutable, or at least more durable) userID value that's not the semantic name, which is kept internally to HN, and isn't publicly exposed (at least not that I've found).
> We rename accounts for HN users all the time. 250 so far this year.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623617
> We're always happy to delete or redact identifying information. We don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. We don't do it by allowing wholesale deletion of account histories, because that would gut the threads the account had participated in, which would be unfair to any commenters who replied, as well as to readers and to the community.
> That doesn't mean we don't care about individual users' needs for protection—we care a lot about it, and help people with these requests every day. We just have to do so with sharper tools, and we have a big bag of tricks for taking care of these things. They include renaming accounts, retroactively assigning comments to throwaway accounts, deleting specific posts (especially if they don't have replies), redacting specific info from posts, and more.
---
Neither GPDR nor CCPA require the deletion of the account or content contributed that does not fall under personally identifying information.
If there are comments that contain PII, that should be sent to HN. Make sure that it is clear that these are PII that contains information that is directly linking to a real person.
Though as noted, wholesale account and comment deletion isn't required and is disruptive.