Regarding the permanent deletion, someone apparently wrote a merged patch for GDPR-compliant data deletion: https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/pull/9466 , although it doesn’t currently seem to be reachable by the frontend according to my AI agent—what would be missing if this was made accessible to users?
While it would be hard to enforce GDPR against Lightcone, and the equivalent California law apparently doesn’t apply to nonprofits, it still seems like a lame excuse to my mind that a simple request to delete data would be “too complicated” and “impose externalities on others”—these laws are motivated exactly by the sort of problems your post discusses, implementing a programmatic account-and-data-deletion feature requires little effort compared to implementing the entire forum, and if you don’t even offer that the externalizing is just going the other way.
When taking GDPR as a standard, it would also not be correct that all data would need to be deleted from all backups immediately for reliability—it would be enough if they get rotated out at some point. Finally, if there is some problem with the database integrity not reflected in the PR, anonymizing the PII while leaving the rows intact would also be acceptable.
I can’t speak for Robert, but one unavoidable externality of data deletion is the impact on the other party. I value my conversation history with others and generally expect to be able to search for things in that history. I would be pretty annoyed if that history disappeared.
The same goes for any public post. Deletion causes dead links.
Regarding the permanent deletion, someone apparently wrote a merged patch for GDPR-compliant data deletion: https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/pull/9466 , although it doesn’t currently seem to be reachable by the frontend according to my AI agent—what would be missing if this was made accessible to users?
While it would be hard to enforce GDPR against Lightcone, and the equivalent California law apparently doesn’t apply to nonprofits, it still seems like a lame excuse to my mind that a simple request to delete data would be “too complicated” and “impose externalities on others”—these laws are motivated exactly by the sort of problems your post discusses, implementing a programmatic account-and-data-deletion feature requires little effort compared to implementing the entire forum, and if you don’t even offer that the externalizing is just going the other way.
When taking GDPR as a standard, it would also not be correct that all data would need to be deleted from all backups immediately for reliability—it would be enough if they get rotated out at some point. Finally, if there is some problem with the database integrity not reflected in the PR, anonymizing the PII while leaving the rows intact would also be acceptable.
I can’t speak for Robert, but one unavoidable externality of data deletion is the impact on the other party. I value my conversation history with others and generally expect to be able to search for things in that history. I would be pretty annoyed if that history disappeared.
The same goes for any public post. Deletion causes dead links.