
Ask HN: Why does Facebook respect my data more than HN? - hawkharris
I don&#x27;t mean for the tone of this submission to be confrontational — I&#x27;m a big fan of the HN community and consume much of my news here — but I was recently troubled to learn that HN doesn&#x27;t let users delete some of their content (most notably, user accounts).<p>Granted, this isn&#x27;t a new issue. I see that, according to The Unofficial HN Blog, the solution is to keep your profile anonymous.<p>Still, HN&#x27;s treatment of personal data is somewhat surprising, considering that this community is so progressive when it comes to discussing privacy issues. In fact, some of the privacy-related HN posts about Facebook inspired me to delete my personal data from that site.<p>Why does Facebook seem to be more accommodating than HN when it comes to giving me the freedom to access my own data?
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pg
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
> 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
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
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

~~~
toomuchtodo
Reddit still gives you the ability to delete your comments at any time. Hacker
News does not.

------
rmrfrmrf
> _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
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.

------
quesera
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.

------
zck
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
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
I think there are other admins besides PG. I don't know who they are or how
many there are.

------
xerophtye
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.

~~~
evincarofautumn
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.

~~~
xerophtye
I haven't played with the downloaded data yet, but I did this experiment once:

1) Copy Url of one of ur pics and save it somewhere.

2) Delete that Picture. (Now it doesn't show up in your photo album)

3) Access through saved link.

When i tried it, the image was still accessible, so FB didn't REALLY delete
it. They just told me they did. I dont think it would show up in downloaded
data (i am pretty sure they are smart enough), but they still have it. So...

Disclaimer: It maybe that for some optimization stuff, they use a deferred
delete mechanism where they REALLY delete it from the system at a later date.
But even if the saved link doesn't work, there's the possibility that they
just changed the link.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Pictures can take weeks to be purged from their CDN, but when deleted, they
are removed from the origin.

------
andymoe
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?

------
taspeotis
> 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
I don't think it would take "Facebook grade" anything to enable deleting or
deactivating accounts.

------
superuser2
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.

------
Qantourisc
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 ?

------
accountoftheday
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.

------
dutchbrit
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...

------
jasonkester
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.

------
zokier
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
[https://www.hnsearch.com/api](https://www.hnsearch.com/api)

------
buro9
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.

------
jheriko
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...

