Wahaha wrote on March 7, 2021 at 9:29 AM

The entire point of decentralization is to make exactly this impossible. The promise is that no one even has the ability to memory hole anything.

The right to be forgotten isn't granted in the centralized world, either. On a technical level, all that happens is that what you posted gets hidden. Easily retrievable ten years down the line, if someone with access wanted to. The reasons for that are legal in nature, as far as I know. So if it's a small site without a bunch of lawyers in the background, you might have a chance to get your stuff actually deleted. Especially if the one who operates it likes the concept of privacy. But as a user, you have no way to verify either way.

Since decentralization redistributes power from a single source to everyone, in a decentralized network everyone has that ability. Of course, everyone would first have to agree on hiding the content in the first place.

I don't really get why people want this "right" anyway. It doesn't exist in real life. All your records are kept and all the people involved will remember. Imagine if Donald Trump would say "guys, I really want to be forgotten online, please delete everything mentioning my name". That would be ridiculous, wouldn't it?

[deleted] wrote on March 8, 2021 at 2:23 AM

Wahaha wrote on March 8, 2021 at 8:47 AM

GDPR only applies to personal data. Whatever you posted is still fair game. Especially if it was under a pseudonym in the first place. It's different from the "right to be forgotten".

Also, on a technological level this process isn't automated. Someone has to go in there, make sure it's your data and delete it manually from the database. It could be automated in the future, but it wasn't in the past and without building everything from scratch again, it also won't be in the future.

Also, I'm an IT guy from Europe that is very fortunate that no one ever asked for shit to be deleted. But on the bright side, even if somebody did, there's still no way for them to verify that we actually deleted everything. So reasonably, all we have to do is to no longer expose their information and nobody would be any the wiser.