Since the introduction of GDPR and the concept of the "right to be forgotten", forum owners have faced some tricky issues around members wanting to delete their profiles. On this site, you can ask to be banned but you have no rights to anything you have posted as it is considered community content- a fair enough point of view, seeing as people have often replied to your threads and taken time to moderate your content etc.

There is a thread where people ask for their profiles and all data to be deleted, but they have no recourse should the site owner decide to refuse those requests. Let's look at what this means for all of us, and whether it's legal, fair or reasonable to continue this policy.

Firstly, lets look at the law. The GDPR requires that users have a way to delete their personal data. It specifically defines “personal data” in these terms:
‘personal data means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person"
Threads/posts in the forums, however, do not qualify as personal data so log as you don't identify yourself. If you have posted any personal data in the forums, then a moderator will quite happily remove that specific information on request.

So you have the right for personally identifiable information to be removed, but stuff you post can be anonymized and kept- it'd be chaos if a 700-reply thread was suddenly deleted because the originator deleted their profile.

Secondly let's look at the fair and reasonable aspect. Is it fair to have to ask a moderator, in an open thread, for their profile to be deleted? Probably not. Is it reasonable to allow people to delete their profiles, leaving only anonymous posts to keep the forum readable? Probably yes.

What do people think about the current terms of membership of this site? Would it be cool to have a "Delete my profile" option where all personal data was removed but posted content retained? Would you like more control over your User Generated Content on sites like this? Does the current set-up make you wary of posting anything that you know you can't delete?

This isn't Facebook obviously and some people post comments they later wish they hadn't. But on Facebook you can delete your whole profile, content and everything, should you so wish.

Would this site be better if you could change your mind after a post? The Moderators do a brilliant job and most of us are cool about the forum otherwise we wouldn't be here. We've all been dicks on the internet though and I wonder if people think there should be more options to manage and control what you post on here?

For example I'll probably think this is a stupid thread to have started in a few hours but people might reply and deleting it is a waste of their time.

Seeing people asking for their entire profile and data to be deleted is obviously important to them, so where do we find the balance between a functioning forum and allowing people to delete themselves (they might have real-world serious reasons with serious consequences?)

The right to be forgotten (if you're in the EU) means you can ask and expect all personally identifiable data held by any website (such as this) to be permanently deleted (cookies, IPs, logins, emails etc) but as long as profile posts are unable to be traced to a real person, they can stay.

Personally my ISP already knows way too much so it doesn't matter, but I think on here profile deletion should be allowed and any content simply re-named "deleted user". Media should also be deleted if requested.

Mods- I know you have your work cut out already but rules should evolve with the times, and data laws are only going to get tighter so getting ahead of the game can't hurt. Giving users more control to manage their content I think is a good thing. Many members only realize they can't delete their content when they really need to, and maybe making this very clear (even more than it is) might be enough.

Anyway just thought I'd open a thread about this sort of malarkey, in case anyone gets bored of the rest of the awesome content and stuff. x