Cubicle 7 forums to close due to EU data law

[tomBitonti]

For folks looking for a deeper view of the GDPR, this seems to be a good start:

https://www.dataiq.co.uk/blog/summary-eu-general-data-protection-regulation

Any other good links that folks have found?

Thx!
TomB

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Ah, so that is why I couldn't get to some of my sites from Europe that last two weeks.

Why couldn't C7 just deny access to those from the EU? Or would that matter? I know the local paper cannot be reached in the EU currently over this but they didn't shut down. Of course they have no business venture in the EU being a Saint Louis paper.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

Ah, so that is why I couldn't get to some of my sites from Europe that last two weeks.

Why couldn't C7 just deny access to those from the EU? Or would that matter? I know the local paper cannot be reached in the EU currently over this but they didn't shut down. Of course they have no business venture in the EU being a Saint Louis paper.

C7 is a British company, so until the withdrawal from the EU is finalized in another year or two, all British companies have to play by EU rules.

 

[aramis erak]

A long time ago I recall some guy left EnWorld and demanded that Morrus remove all his posts. Which was a laughable demand of course - he had hundreds and hundreds of them and each needed to be remove by hand. He started to do it himself (or maybe he completed that).

Strangely, I think under this new law if a user demanded that all their posts be removed...they would in fact have that right under this law, and the owner of the site would have to comply or face a regulatory violate.

Which is silly. But my admittedly brief read of the legal summaries I am seeing on this law would lead to that conclusion.

Under VBuletin, removal of all a user's posts is a trivial task for admins. Removal of the quotes thereof is the non-trivial task.

(How do I know this? I run a large vBulletin-powered site: Travellerrpg.com)

The issue is damage to the integrity of the conversations.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

C7 is a British company, so until the withdrawal from the EU is finalized in another year or two, all British companies have to play by EU rules.

Ah, didn't know they were UK based.

 

[Mistwell]

Under VBuletin, removal of all a user's posts is a trivial task for admins. Removal of the quotes thereof is the non-trivial task.

(How do I know this? I run a large vBulletin-powered site: Travellerrpg.com)

The issue is damage to the integrity of the conversations.

It was a long time ago. Maybe he was complaining about those quotes? I don't know.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=2525]Mistwell[/MENTION], [MENTION=6779310]aramis erak[/MENTION]

The poster was Raven Crowking. He demanded that his posts be removed, but the demand was (sensibly) ignore. He therefore started to do it himself, editing out each post using the "edit" function. The issue was not about the capacity of the forum software.

 

[Dioltach]

As I understand it, anything that is intended to be public is not considered private. So the GDPR doesn't cover posts on a public forum, or any details that the data subject publishes elsewhere on the internet.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

The major global megacorps aren’t dismissing it as “bluster”. It was announced two years ago. It’s not a new thing, despite the last minute panic. It’s not bluster; it will be enforced if companies operate within the EU. The EU has always been strict on data protection (one reason it was always hard to export data to US companies which didn’t have adequate protection).

So, I work in IBM as an architect for data analytics. Obviously I can’t tell you a ton of details about my work, but I can assure everyone that it has been on big companies radars for a long while; that they are taking it very seriously — its not 4% of profits, but of revenue — that is an ungodly large number for big players; and that they are spending a lot of time and effort making are all the employees understand it.

Also, to me it appears like all the steps we are taking are ones that as customers i’d be really happy to see. Things like not allowing companies just to grab info about you without an immediate purpose — no ‘Just asking’ sorts of questions. The responsibility being firmly placed on the people who control your information regardless of who they subcontract or sell to is another big one. And the right to delete is very strong.

Very often when a US company has to comply with a foreign law there’s a lot of sighing going on and people complaining. with GDPR that hasn’t been the case, as far as I can see. It seems, from my POV, to be accepted as a reasonable law where compliance is expensive, sure, but has a good purpose and so worth doing well.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and I speak only for myself, not for IBM.

 

[asdgljdsgbdsfab]

I ensured we were OK for GDPR months ago. For a message board like this, it's not a very onerous task. We collect almost zero user data here (username, email, IP, basically) and it isn't shared anywhere. And yep, the functionality to delete an account is present if it becomes needed. We're good.

If anybody from C7's forums comes over here, they're very welcome, of course. Heck, if there was a demand for it, I'd create an emergency subform for them like I did for WotC.

How the heck do we delete accounts we didn't intend to create!?