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Comment by erickj | Hacker News Reader

I don't know when it was most recently changed, but...

"and you grant Stack Overflow the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to access, use, process, copy, distribute, export, display and to commercially exploit such Subscriber Content, even if such Subscriber Content has been contributed and subsequently removed by you"

https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public

This content isn't licensed under CC-BY-SA to stackoverflow, it carries additional riders which grant SO the legal right to sell it however they please.

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Those are fairly cookie-cutter clauses. Imagine trying to operate a website serving user-submitted content without those rights - it can't be done.

Interestingly, the one commonly-seen phrase missing here is "sublicense". IANAL, but it seems they aren't allowed to just sell it to whoever they want. Perhaps their deal with OpenAI just completely ignores this (their business hinges on training being fair use anyways) and what they are actually selling is convenient API access?

Isn’t this an obvious GDPR violation to say users can’t remove content? Maybe Stack Overflow is setting themselves up for a massive civil penalty in the order of many tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for denying European citizens their right to remove their data from the platform

I see nothing here that indicates a person has the right to have Stack Overflow answers deleted: https://gdpr.eu/right-to-be-forgotten/

First, I don't see how or why an answer would be considered "personal" data that is subject to this regulation at all. As far as I'm aware, that means data about yourself, not every piece of information about everything you have ever committed to public record. Second, Stack Overflow pretty clearly serves an informational purpose in the public interest that would be impeded if answers get deleted, which specifically makes it exempt.

The same thing goes for Europeans thinking Hacker News needs to let you delete comment history. If you say more than you intended in a specific instance, giving away information that can be used to identify you, you can ask to have that deleted and they will do it. In fact, I've done that myself. If you ask to have your entire comment history deleted, they do not have to do that.

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