Good, because the answer to that is clearly 'no', but
> it can be argued that once YC has established a sufficient nexus within a particular country it can be held to its laws (in this case, DE data protection and privacy laws which are far stricter than those of NL, afaik).
Suggested clearly otherwise, so it looks like you have changed your stance on that.
> Whether this is practically enforceable (like the UK libel judgement against Arrington personally) is a different matter.
Arrington was personally liable, which is a completely different thing than the one you are talking about right now.
> For me personally, pg acting on account and data deletion requests would simply be an act of courtesy that we can expect from him.
I disagree with you.
A free, online forum is exactly what it seems, a place where your opinion can be expressed and will distribute your opinion to strangers.
Expectations like this is what drives the weird terms-of-service that many websites have, the overhead on the kind of activity deployed and the income generated from that preclude manual intervention on behalf of every Tom, Dick and Harry that decide they want to rewrite history after the fact. Besides it being simply a lot of work.
If you do not want your words to be stored in an online service, do not put them there in the first place.
Fora are especially important in that they serve as means of communication, in effect you are asking to be able/allowed to retract your statements after any arbitrary period of time.
If that were to be actually enforceable the only thing that would change would be the terms of service, getting you to agree explicitly with the giving up of that particular right since it completely renders the whole forum concept moot.
Every thread topic ever started by a user that requests to delete their content, every answer to every comment they ever wrote would suddenly stop making sense.
news.yc gives you an hour after you post to retract your words, if you do not wish to make use of that right then it lapses, which I think is a really nice medium between the two worlds.
