GDPR and Boards.ie post removal policy **update linked in OP 24/5/18**

Let’s discuss this separately, as it’s going off topic from GDPR, and I want to understand what you’re seeing first.

Steve wrote: »

My email hash is 43307bb5a6588447270a4d81cce6f3ff)

If you email me there within 30 days, I'll give you €100 and resign as a mod here.

Assuming that was a valid hash and not a troll, you may want to give this site a look...
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2018/04/09/four-cents-to-deanonymize-companies-reverse-hashed-email-addresses/

The upshot (TL:DR) of that article is that there are about 5 Billion valid email addresses in use. One single Amazon EC2 machine at the cost of $0.0069 will calculate 450 billion hashes in one second. So its honestly not inconceivable to reverse a common hash and extrapolate the original email by brute force and a little knowledge. Even quicker if it is a genuine email and was pwned in any of the leaks over the last several years.

There are also companies that will provide this service for you if you dont know how yourself. https://datafinder.com/products/email-recovery
Will recover emails from hashes for $0.04 per email, but have a minimum order value of $99. So your €100 prize leaves a little profit for anyone interested.

Just a general thread comment below, not specific to any user or the above.
With GDPR, everybody is an "expert" and "opinions" vary on the details. Boards have no real option when requested but to comply and delete all associated posts and quotes attributed to the data subject. While the spirit of GDPR is personally identifiable information, the tiniest bit of information in the right hands can open the floodgates to someones life history. To cover themselves, a full deletion of posts and quoted material is required. This will persist until the GDPR is tested in the courts and a clearer guideline is set.

Will this ruin boards, no, IMHO this happened a long time ago. But this GDPR assault on boards will only be a tiny fraction of the user base. And will mainly consist of users who spit the dummy at a mod decision and don't get their way in dispute resolution.

Ultimately GDPR is good and now is the time to clear up your drunken web rants from the last 20 years while there is still confusion on the details and everybody is extra cautious to be compliant.

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

Out of curiosity since you seem to be one of the first ones to have gone through it, was the process quick and easy to get all your posts deleted? (bar the few glitches with the deletion script).

salonfire wrote: »

May take a long time, but still meets the definition of the law I imagine.

To meet the definition of the law, boards would have to review each of the individual requests though.

So imagine it worked as you suggest and a poster who has a history of 20000 posts actually cares about deletions and spends hundreds of hours going through their history before submitting a list of 19677 posts they want deleted.

Boards will then have to either blank accept the deletion and delete these posts (which might be a total pain depending on how easy it is to write a script which will do it automatically and reliably based on how the data deletion request was formatted by the user).

Or if they want to “protect” some posts which are not deemed personal data they will have to go through these 19677 posts, review each of them and explain why some of them are not deemed personal data and they refuse to delete them.

Let alone the requester, none of this is really practical for boards and full deletion is probably the best way to go in these situations.

With a lot of supposed good posts that get deleted, an awful lot of old sh!te will be too, so it's swings and roundabouts. In the future. Of course.

_Dara_ wrote: »

Well, sure. But the rubbish can just be ignored. They are worth having there to keep the good posts.

I think you're right though, about it hopefully only being a handful that bother.