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.

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.

[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.

[jacquesm]

> 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.

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.

[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.

[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).

[jacquesm]

His name isn't there, it's just a non-specific alias.

I read it to mean 'dave australia', if he is actually called 'dave au' then that's slightly different.

[Confusion]

A real name has to go, but there is no requirement to remove a nickname or an account.

[authentic]

regulation outside the US may not apply here but this is not how the law works in the EU, which deals with the data itself rather than just identification.

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.

[Confusion]

Not on online forums where you need to agree with a halfway decent User Agreement before you can open an account. You grant the forum copyright on your posts. There is, for instance, no way to get your posts removed from Anandtech's forum, if they don't want to. You get them anonimized at best.

[authentic]

a user agreement cannot override statutory rights.

[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.)

[stingraycharles]

He wasn't implying that Dutch law was valid in the US, he was simply stating that because perhaps there is some similar law in the US (hence the "I don't know about the US").

Besides, does one really need to provide a valid reason to delete an account ? Isn't "just because" good enough ?

[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.

[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.

[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.