Recycle Bin for user accounts

Started by hugbear, February 23, 2016, 02:22:26 PM

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hugbear

When users request the deletion of their own account including posts, those posts are gone forever. It would be nice for admins to be able to move the account with all post to a kind of a "Recycle Bin", so further claims (from the deleted users themselves or from law-enforcing agencies, etc.) could be met. I would imagine one solution would be taking a specially-marked backup right before the deletion but it's a bit cumbersome and can't be done by moderators.

vbgamer45

I kind of like the idea. I perfer soft deletes when possible then full deletes so there is always a record
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Antes

Quote from: vbgamer45 on February 23, 2016, 02:35:36 PM
I kind of like the idea. I perfer soft deletes when possible then full deletes so there is always a record

Theoricly speaking, how much time it'll get to hack into SMF's recycle board option and add "can see own topics" - "can restore own topics" permission. So that'll fix the problem?

hugbear

I don't think it would solve this type of problem. As a matter of fact, the Recycle board is only accessible to the mods as it is now (users are't even aware of its existence). There's no problem with deleted posts belonging to active or banned users or, indeed, to accounts which were deleted but their posts were kept; these deleted posts quietly go to r.i.p. in the recycle board. It's rather a punctual issue, with users which requested full deletion of their account and their entire activity on the forum, which does *not* preserve anything in Recycle.

Admittedly, it's not a common occurrence but when it happens it's pretty irreversible...

As a side note, is there at this moment any law that requires administrators in EU compliance with unconditional deletion requests from users? We would rather deny this type of requests, for their disruptive effect.

tpgames

The wikipedia has an interesting article on "The right to be forgotten".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten

It is NOT legal advice. However, my advice is to consult a solicitor or lawyer as they are the only ones who can really tell you for sure, what the law says. Anyone else telling you, could still open you up for legal consequences if they get it wrong. In my opinion, it is better to be safe than sorry, which is why if someone request 100% deletion, I would just go ahead and do that. Why? The court cost to fight the person who wants 100% deletion - even if that person has no rights to request this - would still cost more than the headache of simply deleting all their posts.

Secondly, if you are asked to delete  copyright materials, often it is a safety mechanism to protect you, to ban the user if they violate again - and delete all of their content (like YouTube does) just so that you can prove that you do not support such copyright violations and are tough on such things. Using YouTube's policy and how they do things, should protect most people, but YouTube also has a huge team of lawyers on board.

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