Staff will not delete or anonymize my account, what can I do?

Community
1

Suppose a community has only one admin (who is biased) and refuses to delete/anonymize my account. What is the way I have to simply leave that community and take out my name from there?

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2

You could slowly self delete your content (posts, but not first posts in topics), but there are rate limits. So you would need to do it every day for quite some time. How many posts do you have there?

3

Rename yourself to anon1234, upload a new avatar, delete everything you can, change email to something throwaway.

4

You can’t rename yourself after the first few days by default.

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5

Maybe over 500. I was quite active there but then, the admin went rouge and started to impose a lot of censorship and is constantly dishonoring the request to remove my account.

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6

Post that “GDPR letter” and complain to their domain registrar? Also call the EU Commission and ask them what to do in such cases?

7

But I’m not an EU resident or citizen.

8

Ah … Pretend? :wink:

Say you are using a VPN :slight_smile:

The potential fines are quite high!:

https://www.itgovernance.co.uk/dpa-and-gdpr-penalties

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9

I doubt it’s gonna bring more bad to me than good.
I however there should be a process in discourse itself to set a self-anonymize for users who want to leave a community. Maybe make it a 15 days process like facebook does but it should be there when there are exceptions like this.

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10

Yeah good idea … sorry you are going through that … that is mean of the admin … takes very little work to anonymize …

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11

I recommend trying to take the legal route, too. Especially since there’s nothing stopping the admin from restoring anything you delete from a backup.

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12

And there is a time of answers, after which I can not remove them. (like this 3 month?)

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13

Travel to the EU :smiley: You need to be “in the EU”, you do not need to be a resident or citizen.

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14

That looks on point! However, there would be a lot of financial considerations to be made. I’ll keep it as a last option of sorts if nothing else works out.

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15

@codinghorror one more fellow on a forum who has a lower trust level is having same problem.

Now, they’re stuck because they don’t have a delete button on their posts (possibly because of a lower trust level?)

16

That’s harsh. :relieved:
So, he really refused to delete the account? :thinking:

17

I can understand why deleting an account might be refused. Deleting an account means deleting their posts. For an account with no or few posts it might not be so bad. But for an account with a lot of posts deleting them could likely trash a lot of topics. If a post was the OP of a topic, the entire topic would be deleted.

On the other hand, I think refusing to anonymize an account is wrong as long as the member understands the ramifications and is firm on the decision.

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18

Anonymizing by default if an account can’t be deleted (somewhat like deactivating on facebook) should be automated IMO.

19

Yes, could you give user discretion on this “out of the box”? Any downsides?

We go on about dodgy users and ‘trolls’ all the time but my goodness some admins/mods out there can really stink too! Some totally abuse their ‘power’.

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20

I’m not so sure it should be made easy to do unless and until it also becomes easy to undo. Even though anonymizing isn’t as drastic as deletion, it’s still drastic.

But like I posted, I can’t think of any reason for an Admin to refuse an informed request.

1 Like