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Ask HN: How do I delete my HN account?

18 points| _qbjt | 4 years ago

Could @dang or someone else please help me with this? I've read that all one needs to do is send an email to hn@ycombinator.com but my requests have been ignored up to this point. Thanks.

9 comments

dang|4 years ago

Sorry, it's just a matter of the inbox exceeding my capacity to process it quickly.

_qbjt|4 years ago

No problem at all, I understand inbox fatigue. I just sent you another email so you don’t have to go looking for the others. Thanks!

cyber_kinetist|4 years ago

Maybe try (politely) emailing him once more? He's probably bombarded with lots of emails all the time and might have missed yours.

Also, dang usually doesn't like people deleting accounts (since it goes against the HN philosophy of leaving the website as a permanent record). A more easily accepted request is to change the username to something different, which is not a bad option if you want to erase traces of yourself.

flashgordon|4 years ago

Does this not make it CCPA uncompliant? Or GDPR uncompliant (if HN is served in EU)?

mtmail|4 years ago

I emailed them now pointing to this thread in case your email was filtered by spam filter or such.

_moof|4 years ago

You can't.

cyber_kinetist|4 years ago

In the FAQ:

"We try not to delete entire account histories because that would gut the threads the account had participated in. However, we care about protecting individual users and take care of privacy requests every day, so if we can help, please email hn@ycombinator.com. We don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. More here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623799)"

So if you have a really good reason to delete your account, then maybe dang will accept the request.

selestify|4 years ago

Doesn't sound CCPA compliant.