
Ask PG: I'd like to delete my account. - dave_au
Can anyone help with this?  From what I've gotten from google I'm meant to contact PG somehow.<p>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.<p>Edit: Thanks for the tip - title changed, hopefully that helps.
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dave_au
Sorry to those who are curious, but I'm not going to state my reason - it's
not all that personal but is still well with in the realm of "my own
business". Surely it's not a prerequisite for deleting an account.

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.

~~~
rdtsc
> I could probably exit the site very rapidly by way of a submission script

But that would certianly fall within the realm of "hacking"

~~~
omouse
It would fall under SPAMMING.

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xiaoma
Considering how even non-personal information becomes identifiable in
aggregate, this is a feature that any social site with a conscience should
have. Otherwise, the risk to privacy is both impossible to gauge and
continuously growing.

~~~
jacquesm
Or, alternatively you could simply think about the consequences of what you
write before you write it.

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.

~~~
xiaoma
I think you've missed the point I was making. The consequences are unknowable
at the point of writing. The ability to search, organize and analyze data has
grown and will continue to grow.

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.

~~~
jacquesm
You have it backwards :)

 _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.

------
jacquesm
I'm not even sure if that possibility exists but since your account does not
seem to be attached to anything personal as far as I can see and since you
have barely posted / commented here what is the reason you want it deleted ?

Keep in mind that deleting an account means that all the replies to your
comments / submissions would be left 'hanging' in space.

~~~
jvdh
I don't know about the US, but over here in the Netherlands any service must
respond to a request to remove your records. They must comply, or provide a
very good reason why your comments/submissions must remain. (In discussions
comments can stay if required for the discussion to make sense, but the name
has to go).

~~~
jrockway
HN is not in the Netherlands, so this is completely irrelevant. (Just like
when some company in the US sends a DMCA takedown notice to the Netherlands.)

~~~
authentic
technically, YC has a European subsidiary (a startup funded by them).

~~~
jacquesm
So ?

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.

~~~
authentic
you misunderstood. 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).

on a much larger scale, watch for the impending fight between the EU
commission and facebook about this very issue.

~~~
jacquesm
No, you misunderstood the law.

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.

~~~
authentic
Not at all saying the subsidiary would be held responsible here (they are not
operating the website in question anyway), it does however affect the question
whether the parent is conducting significant business in a particular country.
Whether this is practically enforceable (like the UK libel judgement against
Arrington personally) is a different matter.

For me personally, pg acting on account and data deletion requests would
simply be an act of courtesy that we can expect from him.

~~~
jacquesm
> Not at all saying the subsidiary would be held responsible here (they are
> not operating the website in question anyway),

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.

~~~
authentic
I have not changed my stance on anything.

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.

~~~
jrockway
Spam is not eliminated by deletion, it's eliminated by killing. If you set
showdead=1 in your preferences, you can see the spam. It's annoying.

------
niyazpk
Edit your title to add _Ask PG_. Hopefully PG will read those.

If you don't mind me asking, can we know why anyone would want to delete their
account?

~~~
jgrahamc
Or just send him an email.

------
ars
What do you want to delete?

Your comments?

Your name from the comments?

Remove your access?

------
jordyhoyt
In a similar vein, I'd like to rename my account. Though, I doubt this is
easy, so I'll just grin and bear it.

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csomar
Try to hack into the HN servers and drop your records ;)

~~~
rbanffy
<http://xkcd.com/327/> should give you a start ;-)

~~~
joshhart
news.yc uses flat files.

~~~
rbanffy
Then instead of "delete" we will have to use "sed" or "grep -v" to remove the
login... ;-)

~~~
vaporstun
use ack! - [<http://betterthangrep.com/>]

------
wendroid
Just post two ironically abusive comments and before long you're banned with
no appeal or explanation, worked for me.

(or that's what I think happened - they even let you post for 2 weeks without
telling you no-one can read it!)

------
authentic
i did mail pg with a similar request (different account), and he essentially
responded that he could not be bothered to implement deletion or do it
manually.

------
jodrellblank
PG is the site admin, his mailbox is the appropriate place for site admin
questions, surely?

~~~
sfk
The poster has said:

"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.

~~~
jodrellblank
What is standard nettiquette? Cluttering a site used by hundreds of people to
ask an admin question to an admin? Yes the poster said he doesn't want to
clutter his inbox, but regardless of want isn't that the right place for his
question?

I know pg is _PG_ , but _that_ doesn't seem relevant to _this_.

