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Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

Preventing people from deleting all their answers has long been the policy; this is nothing new.

And before anyone brings it up: GDPR does not mean "every single bit of information I ever wrote can be deleted whenever I want". Not on HN, and certainly not on Stack Overflow where you agreed to have everything under the CC license. It's painful how badly some people understand the GDPR.

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According to OSNews' quote of the source, it's not even a permanent ban (as the title on HN implies), but a 7-day ban.

https://www.osnews.com/story/139601/stack-overflow-signs-dea...

You need to try very very hard to get a permanent ban on Stack Overflow. And even most "permanent" bans are only for 10 years. There are some exceptions, but it's rare and only after persistent serious long-term abuse and all the shorter bans didn't work.

You're right of course. It makes me wonder though about the legitimacy of keeping someone's name next to an answer, and in principle allowing the answer to be edited and updated, but preventing some kinds of edits.

One might reasonably claim that SO is doing something equivalent to saying "this person thinks the answer as written is true and implicitly endorses the products involved". YMMV, but publishing something like this, especially with the knowledge that the person would like the post removed, could be considered defamatory.

> It makes me wonder though about the legitimacy of keeping someone's name next to an answer

You can delete your account; that's not a problem. I know because I did that myself in spite of having quite high reputation (for the politics site, due to rampant antisemitism there).

After that it will just show as "user12312".

> and certainly not on Stack Overflow where you agreed to have everything under the CC license

Does OpenAI comply with the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license terms? AFAIK (I don't use their products, so don't know much), they don't actually include 'derived from original by ...' and 'licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0' in their works, and StackOverflow has no rights to relicense the content to a different license.

I don't know; I think the exact legal status of copyright and training is still unclear at this moment. OpenAI claims it's all "fair use"; others disagree. Thus far it's untested in court AFAIK, although there's some procedures on-going.

I'm not defending Stack Overflow and/or OpenAI here; I also pretty much stopped all my contributions for various reasons. I'm just saying it's fine for them to have reasonable protections against sour grape deletions, and that GDPR has nothing to say about this.

> Not on HN

From the privacy policy:

> you represent and warrant that you own all right, title and interest in and to such User Content, including, without limitation, all copyrights and rights of publicity contained therein

So I'm pressing X for doubt, but someone with legal knowledge may enlighten me otherwise.

Public comments are not personal data, either in the "common sense" meaning or as defined by the GDPR. Maybe purely legally you can revoke permission for HN to publish your comments, I'm not sure about that, but that's a completely different copyright thing unrelated to GDPR.

I was a bit shortsighted on the "I ever wrote can be deleted whenever I want" and relation to that, but yes that makes sense.

That means that you own whatever you're putting in a comment - you are not pasting in copyrighted content in violation of fair use exceptions.

For example, pasting in the text of a paywalled article.

It doesn't mean "you retain ownership of the content."

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