Can’t find it!!!
Umm, you used to be able to get deleted by writing “What a Great President Trump Was”.
‘Go 45!’ or ’ Make America Great Again!’
Not sure how to do that anymore, though. Good Luck with that.
:^)
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You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave …
Seriously, I found this info, so the admins should change the settings to let users manage their accounts:
**"The user can self-delete account if:
** 1 post or less and
** their account is less than a few days old
*This setting kicks in on post number 2. You can self-delete if you have 0 or 1 posts. This self-delete option is right at the bottom of their user preferences page.
*If you are forum admin, you may change this setting via delete_all_posts_max and delete user max post age."
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Knock knock, anybody here?
So hidden on this page:
I found this link:
https://preferences.fool.com/privacy
where it seems you can request having your account deleted.
First I asked for a report of which data they have stored about me. Not that they have much, I think.
Well, assuming they have any kind of copy anywhere for any purpose, you could always ask them to return your posts from the old boards to you.
So I received the requested data the Fool has stored about me the other day. Not unexpected, but still impressive to see:
In total tens of thousands of entries since 2015, with every page I visited on the boards, together with exact time stamp, IP address and location that I visited from. Unfortunately no copy of posts I made.
A rather complete travel profile could be made from the data. Not that it would be of much use to anyone, but still…makes one think about the amount of data we leave on the interwebs every day.
One reason I avoid using Google for search (use duckduckgo or startpage = Google results without the tracking) don’t browse while being logged into Google (just use a different browser for gmail and other google services), use Firefox with ublock and ghostery. Those are just some easy things, without going to paranoid extremes, that radically reduce your footprint without much inconvenience.
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It is nice that they provided this data, but I find the storage of it unnecessarily and even ghastly. I have gone out of my way to not store info about what users are doing at shrewdm.com and it doesn’t even know what posts are read, let alone storing IP info. It only stores the latest date a board was visited so it can know to notify a new post, but it is overwritten each time a board is visited so only the latest date is known and not a date history! I find storing what users are doing extremely bad taste and just instinctively don’t want to know about it!
Automated social observing (treating people as just nodes to take advantage of, rather than real people) can be creepy.
— Manlobbi
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Holy… That’s an insane amount of data. Eight YEARS of logs. That’s not normal, even by today’s standards of tracking every move and every thought. One could infer just about anything about you just from that alone. When considering the aggregate across all users, possibly enriched with external sources, well… I could write a book about that but won’t go there.
Did this data contain visits to boards.fool.com only, or fool.com in general? And I assume you received more than activity logs?
Incidentally, this strengthens my belief that the posts from the old boards are not entirely erased from history. It would be foolish for a company not to retain such data in this day and age, and I’ve noted the silence on the subject. Retaining potentially decades’ worth of user activity data in an accessible format while obliterating user content doesn’t make sense.
As for what you received, I wonder how one would square this with the privacy policy:
We retain personal data for as long as necessary to fulfill any legal obligations we may have as well as for purposes of processing your information for the delivery of our services (for example, if you continue to subscribe to one of our email-based services, we will need your information to email the service to you). We may also retain aggregate information beyond this time for research purposes and to help us develop and improve our services. You cannot be identified from aggregate information retained or used for these purposes.
There are quite a lot of regulations around this though. Retaining the data you received would require a pretty solid reason even if the privacy policy had informed you of that being the case.
Tell me about it… I’ve been barking up that tree for ages.
(PS. I have at least 80% of your posts from the old boards.)
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I only bother to use those when I’m planning to murder someone, otherwise I don’t really much care. I’m on TV cameras at PetSmart, license plate readers on cop cars that drive by, and my neighbor knows how to get in my house. The days of “privacy” as as gone as Hopalong Cassidy.
“And yet our Constitution gives your the option of retaining your privacy, even if “you have nothing to hide.”
“I have nothing to hide” ignores the broad sweep of human history. It’s not an argument, it’s a vanity declaration and it’s not in the slightest reassuring.”
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I wasn’t saying “I have nothing to hide.” I have many things in my life that, taken out of context, could prove embarrassing I suppose. (Perhaps that’s why I am sympathetic to politicians and/or celebrities who are under the constant spotlight. Talking about James Corden blowing up in a restaurant, for instance, not George Santos fabulizing every aspect of his life.)
I’m saying that that illusion of personal privacy is already gone. If you’re going to do nefarious things you have to be very smart about it, or you can live a reasonably normal life and ignore it. (Yes, I’ve been hacked, I’ve had credit cards misused, I even had a peeping Tom at one house. Oh well, modern society.)
Lol, I was just teasing you, as I am sure you noticed (but other readers may not have) that I quoted your own words from another thread.
So on the one hand you seem to care about privacy, on the other hand you think it is already gone.
Anyway, to each their own. One does not need to plan anything nefarious to think the amount of data being saved by tech giants is creepy and possibly open to abuse some time in the future. If there are simple steps to reduce my data footprint that don’t take anything away from a usability standpoint, I’ll take them.
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i was facing same issue. One of my friend helped me