Delete my account

[penstone]

Can you please delete my account and any data you store about me. Thanks

[6StringJazzer]

Can't be done. You can edit your profile to remove any data you don't want stored. And you have no other posts, so that apparently is not an issue.

[penstone]

It cant be done, or you just don't want to? I believe my rights under GDPR allow me to request my information is deleted or "forgotten"?

How do I stop getting an irritating happy birthday email every year? It is said email that has prompted my request...

[dominicb]

Good afternoon penstone

We do not delete accounts as a rule, without good reason.

Since you are quoting GDPR, your right to be forgotten applies if the data ExcelForum holds on you directly identifies you as an individual - all we know of you is your date of birth and an e-mail address. We don't even know your real name. Mr (Mrs / Miss / Ms) Penstone? Maybe, maybe not. If would like to take this further then the holding company behind ExcelForum is based in India.

As it is, I will point our Admin at this post, and he might delete it, he might not. He can almost certainly stop the Happy Birthday e-mails if that's what is bothering you …

DominicB

[penstone]

I don't understand why you'd be against allowing people to delete their accounts, very odd.

I'm fairly certain you can identify exactly who I am based on my email address and date of birth! My email address is 100% unique to me and me alone, and happens to contain my name within it. Also, the location of the holding company has no affect on GDPR; if the company has a presence in the EU then GDPR applies to EU resident's data.

Thanks for the offer to direct your admin at this post. If you could also request the account is deleted that would be great.

[shg]

I expect the reason to not delete accounts is that it would delete the threads, which would deprive people searching the forum for whatever wisdom or misinformation they contain (which is clearly not applicable here since you only have the posts in this thread).

As to the annoying tendency of people to treat membership as an invitation for spam, I totally agree with you.

[penstone]

I have experience writing GDPR solutions at my place of work. If someone requests to be forgotten you don't have to delete things in the public domain (like forum posts), you just have to anonymise them. So there should be a process that hashes out my username, and ANYTHING personal in my posts or on my account, with random characters. Or the process may move all my posts to a dummy system account (so they can still be viewed) and my account then safely deleted... I'm guessing neither of these processes have been implemented?

[6StringJazzer]

The Administrators or owners of the board may have more powerful tools than Moderators have or are aware of. Even if we permanently ban a user for spam, one of the worst offenses here, the account is not deleted, just made unusable. The only ones who can see your email address are Moderators and Administrators. I appreciate you may feel that even this is a violation of privacy but it is not publicly available. However, you can change the email address anytime you want. I suggest you change it to a random free email address then abandon the email account. Also I believe you can delete your birthday, or at least change it to something random and omit the year, since a birthday is considered private data. That will remove any identifying data and you won't get any more emails.

Happy birthday, by the way, whenever it is.

[rorya]

If someone requests to be forgotten you don't have to delete things in the public domain (like forum posts), you just have to anonymise them.

Removing personal information from your account is extremely simple to do - anyone with high level mod powers should be able to do it. Going through posts to remove personal information would be your responsibility though - they're under no obligation there since you posted it publicly.

[AliGW]

Moderators cannot change or delete personal profile details - only administrators have those privileges.

[rorya]

only administrators have those privileges.

It depends how your group permissions are set. Many places super mods can do it.

[AliGW]

Yes, but not here.

[6StringJazzer]

I think the discussion has gone sufficiently far afield of the OP that we can close this. The OP has removed personal data from the account and there is no post history prior to this thread, so we're done here.

[Richard Buttrey]

Only just seen this but I'd have told she/him that the Moon is out of the jurisdiction of any GDPR regulations here on earth.