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We are never rude or obstinate like this. We will always do whatever we can to protect people's privacy, which we do by redacting PII and moving posts to anonymized accounts.

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adzm 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Conversely, they did help me out.

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downrightmike 6 hours ago | parent [-]

really just whatever dang feels like that day

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tomhow 4 hours ago | parent [-]

We take users' privacy seriously and have had a consistent policy for years. If anyone is worried about personally identifying information, we're always happy to redact the PII and reassign comments/posts to an anonymous account. The only thing we don't do is wholesale wipe someone's entire history from HN, because it guts the threads and ruins them for everyone else who participated and who might find them interesting to read in the future.

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testing22321 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> If anyone is worried about personally identifying information, we're always happy to redact the PII and reassign comments/posts to an anonymous account

This is the identical line dang fed me, and what he did is useless. It changes nothing.

Stop saying you’ll go out of your way to help users when you clearly won’t. Changing my username on all my old comments to some other username is not enough. It’s trivial to figure out who I am, and then have all my comments attributed to me.

You should aim to actually do better, not just say that what you do now is good enough when it clearly isn’t.

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tomhow an hour ago | parent [-]

We go to great effort to find the right balance between a user's need for privacy and the community/public benefit in keeping threads intact and coherent (moving every one of a user's comments to a different username makes the threads incoherent).

On a case-by-case basis we can move a selection of comments to a separate username. We of course don't want anyone to be in danger.

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testing22321 an hour ago | parent [-]

It seems like you’re more concerned about keeping threads from years ago coherent than you are about my wishes and safety.

Middle ground: on any given topic change all my comments to some random user I’d, then a different one for every topic.

threads will stay coherent, but people won’t be able to follow my old user name around topics for 14 years.

I’ll send an email in the morning. I have to sleep.

	▲	tomhow 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> It seems like you’re more concerned about keeping threads from years ago coherent than you are about my wishes and safety. This is obviously not true. We care about thread persistence and coherence as a default, because some of HN's most historically significant threads are from the earliest years. We will take reasonable steps to protect people's identity and safety once we know the specifics of the situation. We routinely redact URLs, company names, project names and other identifying details from historical comments to prevent people's identity from being inferred.