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stephbook • today at 4:28 AM • 3 replies • view on HN

Would any of the commenters recommend a lawyer for account deletion — when said account gets deleted automatically?

If not, I wonder why it's seen as so critical when Facebook doesn't.


Replies

yoaviram • today at 8:20 AM

I run YourDigitalRights.org where we help people delete their personal data, so this is kind of my thing. Meta is in the top 0.1% of companies in terms of how difficult they make it for people to delete their personal data. They are notoriously difficult, and we keep on playing cat and mouse games with them. They just don't want to delete any kind of personal information. In most cases, I recommend going to the regulator, which is almost all cases involved with Meta. In some exceptional cases, going to a lawyer is a viable course of action, especially when any kind of harm is involved. Imagine a case where someone is extorting you or defaming you, and you can't delete that data even though it refers personally to you. So yeah, it's a viable course of action in some cases.

fy20 • today at 5:04 AM

To be honest it just feels like they were steering the model, which was needed to stop older models hallucinating.

> Do not assert that WhatsApp is or is not responsible for any damages

This doesn't seem such a bad thing, and if as they say it's to steer their support chat bot it makes total sense, as that hallucinating could actually make them legally liable for something it shouldn't.

ArnoVW • today at 6:08 AM

No need for a lawyer.

Just contact their DPO (they are obligated to give a contact) and explain that you want to excercise your right to be forgotten (i.e. delete data)

They then gave 30 days to respond and a few months to do it. Failure to do so is an automatic infraction.

Reporting that failure to your privacy watchdog will suffice.

Provided you live in Europe of course. Otherwise the GDPR does not apply.

Telling people their rights is another legal obligation. Failure to do so is illegal.