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Comment by _qbjt | Hacker News Reader

The irony is that Hacker News is literally unsafe to use as it puts users at risk of doxxing by not providing basic privacy functions like post and/or account deletion or even the ability to change your username. I really don’t understand why the HN crowd (which claims to be privacy focused) never seems to call this site out on that. Did I miss the text when you sign up telling you that everything you post will be publicly accessible for the rest of time? Is there even a mention of it anywhere?

To answer the original question though, no Facebook isn’t safe and never was. Delete your account. I did four years ago and I’ve never missed it.

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>Did I miss the text when you sign up telling you that everything you post will be publicly accessible for the rest of time

While reasonable people can disagree on this point, it seems a valid point of view that once you've publicly posted something that's part of an online conversation you can no longer unilaterally delete it.

once you've publicly posted something that's part of an online conversation you can no longer unilaterally delete it.

But once you delete your account those posts can be attributed to “Deleted User”. HN doesn’t even do that.

I agree that's a more defensible position. Of course, there are lots of situations--you have a bylined article "printed" in a newspaper/magazine, you write a book, you appear speaking in someone else's YouTube video--where it's not really reasonable to expect to be able to expunge what you've written from the public record.

This isn't a new thing. You couldn't typically delete a Usenet post either.

What has changed is how easily and casually people can put things out in public without editorial oversight that they may regret.

You couldn't typically delete a Usenet post either.

In the early days of Usenet posts were ephemeral and would only last a week. That expectation was baked into the culture and everyone was surprised to find a sneaky organisation had been archiving it all to monetise later.

Maybe in the very early days. But there were various archives of many newsgroups pre-Web (much less pre-DejaNews and Google).

Yes lots of groups had their FAQs for example on an FTP site, but ordinary posts weren’t typically archived

HN is public by design so it is assumed that you only post things that you are comfortable with sharing. Even then, I heard that the moderation team is happy to help out if there are a few particular posts you'd like to delete/amend.

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