Ask PG: I'd like to delete my account. Can anyone help with this? From what I've gotten from google I'm meant to contact PG somehow. It's not exactly clear how and if there's some channel I can use that doesn't clutter his inbox I'd like to try that first. Edit: Thanks for the tip - title changed, hopefully that helps. |
If I knew that there wasn't a standard way to delete accounts I probably wouldn't have signed up in the first place. It might help keep the number of temporary accounts, so there's a chance that it's a feature.
The current plan is to wait a while longer, then I'll send PG an email.
A point that I find interesting is that if I didn't care about the community at all I could probably exit the site very rapidly by way of a submission script - not my style, but does make me wonder if it's been tried before. I'm sure it's quicker than an exchange of emails :) And it remains an option if nothing else will do the trick.
Is that your way of threatening ?
> And it remains an option if nothing else will do the trick.
Oh, yes it seems it is.
Well, here's news for you:
A surefire way to get yourself banned, not deleted is such a script.
That means all your information from the past is just as visible as it is today.
And I think it is perfectly reasonable to ask for a reason if you ask someone to do work for you, it's the polite thing.
ANY words you write on the internet or even in email start to have a life of their own right after you hit that 'reply' button. If you're the kind of person that would not stand by their words even years later then you probably shouldn't be clicking that button.
It saves others work down the line, and it saves you embarrassment.
Online practices that were downright conservative in 1997 would expose personal details today. Similarly, what is safe now, likely won't be in the future as data from even more sources gets correlated.
"ANY words you write on the internet or even in email start to have a life of their own right after you hit that 'reply' button. If you're the kind of person that would not stand by their words even years later then you probably shouldn't be clicking that button."
This idea is ridiculous. People can't be expected to never change their minds and email users clearly have an expectation of privacy. Perhaps a few odd characters would happily "stand by their words" and share their email histories with the world, but the vast majority of us would not.
Keep in mind that deleting an account means that all the replies to your comments / submissions would be left 'hanging' in space.
I read it to mean 'dave australia', if he is actually called 'dave au' then that's slightly different.
If you don't mind me asking, can we know why anyone would want to delete their account?
Your comments?
Your name from the comments?
Remove your access?
(or that's what I think happened - they even let you post for 2 weeks without telling you no-one can read it!)
"if there's some channel I can use that doesn't clutter his inbox"
Since this is standard netiquette, actually his mailbox would be an extremely unusual place for questions like this.
I know pg is PG, but that doesn't seem relevant to this.
Because you can not know the consequences at the time of writing you have to think ahead and not write stuff that you think you might regret in the future.
If wishes were horses then beggars would ride, you can wish for a way to undo stuff you said in the past but in practice it will only get harder to do that in the future.
More and more frequently the second you hit 'submit' your content is syndicated all over the globe. I pose that it is impossible to even know who copied down your words and where and when they'll pop up in the future, you should write with that in mind.
The law is a decade behind reality, it has never been any other way with technology. You may be legally in the right and you may have certain expectations but that will not make much difference.
Witness Jimmy Wales trying to wipe out the fact that he owned a porn site, in his profile it says (on wikipedia no less) euphemistically that 'bomis targeted males', but everywhere else ( http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/12/69880 ) for instance it is clearly visible that it was.
The facts stand by themselves, no amount of handwringing or wishing is going to make that any different.
If you don't want to be confronted with your own words in the future, don't write them and if you don't want to be confronted with your own actions in the future, don't do them.
There is no undo button on email to begin with, and no, you can't have a reasonable expectation of privacy there because you are sending your words to someone else.
Who can then choose to make your words public.
Besides, does one really need to provide a valid reason to delete an account ? Isn't "just because" good enough ?
Europe != NL.
And even if, a subsidiary incorporated independently is not going to be liable for acts of the parent company unless they are actively engaged in the same activity.
And in this case they would not be, Ycombinator owns and runs the forum, that startup does its own thing.
on a much larger scale, watch for the impending fight between the EU commission and facebook about this very issue.
not too long ago I compelled a telco who had pissed me off to send me a 200 page dump of all the data they had about me and subsequently delete all of it, using the legal system after they had initially refused.
You have no idea what you are talking about, do you? http://mattmaroon.com/2009/05/01/hacker-news-disease/
There is an inverse to the disease described in that article: the idea that someone with a lack of expert knowledge cannot possible say things that are correct, just because you disagree with him.
The following:
[something] cannot override statutory rights.
is a blanket statement, to which anyone can find counterexamples. You're just not trying, because you are too focussed on your original point.
In general, I know jack about the practice of law and I know it. However I know about this specific instance, because lawyers told me how it works, and I actually do know a bit about theory of law. I'm trying to explain to you how this specific practical fact of law could come about, based on theory of law. Specifically, the fact that laws fall short, for instance because of ambiguity and because of conflicts with other laws. Even the basest constitutional rights give rise to such conflicts, which is why judges are needed to interpret laws. Quite a few laws are around, specifically to stop gaps in other laws. Example: the first sale doctrine.
As an example of an obvious shortcoming: you are allowed to go wherever you want in a public place. The law specifies no limitation on that. However, there certainly is one very certain limitation: you cannot occupy the exact same space someone else is already occupying and you cannot get him to move by claiming your constitutional right to occupy that bit of space. It would be silly to actually codify such limitations in the laws, because their number cannot be exhausted. However, it is a very clear limitation on one of your fundamental rights. This is not my intelligence speaking: this is my knowledge of fundamental problems in philosophical theories of law and their very practical implications.
A startup funded by YC would never ever be seen as a subsidiary.
Google NL BV can be held to the law with respects to google.com, but some start up that google funds will never be used to hold google.com to NL law.
For me personally, pg acting on account and data deletion requests would simply be an act of courtesy that we can expect from him.
Good, because the answer to that is clearly 'no', but
> it can be argued that once YC has established a sufficient nexus within a particular country it can be held to its laws (in this case, DE data protection and privacy laws which are far stricter than those of NL, afaik).
Suggested clearly otherwise, so it looks like you have changed your stance on that.
> Whether this is practically enforceable (like the UK libel judgement against Arrington personally) is a different matter.
Arrington was personally liable, which is a completely different thing than the one you are talking about right now.
> For me personally, pg acting on account and data deletion requests would simply be an act of courtesy that we can expect from him.
I disagree with you.
A free, online forum is exactly what it seems, a place where your opinion can be expressed and will distribute your opinion to strangers.
Expectations like this is what drives the weird terms-of-service that many websites have, the overhead on the kind of activity deployed and the income generated from that preclude manual intervention on behalf of every Tom, Dick and Harry that decide they want to rewrite history after the fact. Besides it being simply a lot of work.
If you do not want your words to be stored in an online service, do not put them there in the first place.
Fora are especially important in that they serve as means of communication, in effect you are asking to be able/allowed to retract your statements after any arbitrary period of time.
If that were to be actually enforceable the only thing that would change would be the terms of service, getting you to agree explicitly with the giving up of that particular right since it completely renders the whole forum concept moot.
Every thread topic ever started by a user that requests to delete their content, every answer to every comment they ever wrote would suddenly stop making sense.
news.yc gives you an hour after you post to retract your words, if you do not wish to make use of that right then it lapses, which I think is a really nice medium between the two worlds.
(Hint: the US is not going to extradite pg for not deleting your HN account.)
Unfortunately they didn't have the best of lawyers from what I've seen.
Suit has to be brought in the local court of the defendant, that's a pretty strong rule there and the lawyer seems to have failed to capitalize on that, instead concentrating on whether the serving was done properly.
By doing that he shifted the argument from one of 'standing' to one on whether they had had proper notice, implicitly acknowledging standing.
Do not make deletions out to be more work than they really are, as others have mentioned the suppression of content from a particular account is already implemented to combat spam. Anyway, deletion of particular message is technically the same as allowing edits after 1hr with a fixed replacement text (such as "[deleted by user]").
User-triggered account "deletion" would be a trivial addition instantly obviating recurring, tedious discussions like this. Even Google lets you retract your submissions from their usenet archives and Groups in a simple way.
There are many valid reasons why a user may wish to have their messages removed that override the interest of forum integrity.
No right lapses after one hour since there is no permanent license grant for user submitted content to HN in the first place (lack of TOS). The copyright of entries remains with the user.