[elmerfud]

The problem is, it's not your account. Whenever you voluntarily give over something to someone else it stops being yours and you stop having the ability to control it, unless there was a specific agreement in place that allowed you to retain control and ownership. There are some sites that allow you to delete your account but I quite honestly don't believe it. They may say that it's deleted and maybe it's deleted and unrecoverable to you but I fully suspect that they still have it maybe he still have access to it it's definitely still available in their backups.

I don't even believe that as a matter of law this could be corrected. Because we have many laws on our books protecting our personal information that we have given over to companies in order to do business with them. Banking institutions collect personal information and there are stringent laws restricting what they can do with it, unless you agree that they can do more with it. Same thing with health care institutions very strong laws preventing the sharing of personal information from health care institutions, unless you agree that they are allowed to share it.

For both banks and health care institutions the problem is you must sign all kinds of agreements before they allow you to do business with them. So those protections enshrined into law mean absolutely nothing because the law does not say that these institutions must do business with you even if you don't agree to their privacy and sharing policies. Which I find rather strange just for two very core institutions to our society. The law protects us but when every bank and every health care place requires you to sign away those protections before they allow you to participate then what good were the protections to begin with?

So if we can't get this right for banking and healthcare what makes you think some little place on the interwebs where you can post quippy comments would be any better?

[krapp]

Every other forum that I'm aware of, including Reddit, allows users to delete their posts and/or accounts.

And no one who signed up to HN did so having first agreed to terms of service which said their comments and account could never be deleted.

[elmerfud]

Do you really think those are actually deleted from those forums? They might be hidden they might remove your name but it's unlikely they are actually deleted.

Also you failed to understand one basic thing, their terms of service wouldn't list something like your account can never be deleted. Because it's not your account it is their system their platform and what you call an account is simply a way for you to access it and post on their system. The terms of service would have to say something like you continue to remain in control of everything that you've written. It's simply doesn't do that and I don't know of any system that does that. Because it's not yours.