Forum posts using real name

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fishyfishy

Free Member
Apr 2, 2019
3
0
  • #1
    Hi, I run a forum business, and we've had a request from a previous user of the forum to delete all of his personal information. The way our software seems to work is that if you delete an account, the previous posts still show. I can't find a way to delete them en masse unfortunately, we would need to go through each one individually and there are thousands!
    The problem is the poster used his real name to post on the forums. Can anyone advise whether under GDPR this counts as us holding personal data about him? Many thanks in advance!
     
    M

    Mike Kilby PC.dp

    Free Member
    Jul 11, 2018
    227
    40
    Northampton, UK
  • #2
    Having the name show could constitute as personal data if it is possible that from the information available, the person could be identified by you or someone else.

    Forums and forum posts are often difficult because they could contain signatures identifiable information within the text. In reality you ought to have a solution that would scan for and remove or anonymise that information.

    So long as you make best efforts you've done all you reasonably can. Often you could just anonymise the account instead of deleting it, changing the email to one of your own or a non-existent email and changing all the identifiable information to Anonymous or similar, which would then filter through all the related posts.
     
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    fishyfishy

    Free Member
    Apr 2, 2019
    3
    0
  • #3
    Yes I wish I had done that! I hadn't realised that once I deleted a user's account the old posts would still show their username - a good lesson for next time as our software would allow us to do this, but I had wrongly assumed that deleting an account would anonymise the posts. The posts pre-date GDPR but I guess that doesn't matter...
    Thankyou for your help, much appreciated.
     
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    M

    Mike Kilby PC.dp

    Free Member
    Jul 11, 2018
    227
    40
    Northampton, UK
  • #4
    Pity. For future i'd suggest creating a test account, adding a couple of posts and then trying anonymising it to see if that would work. It may be (depending on the system) that it's hard coded into the post data, which could be a problem.

    What platform is the forum running on? Often for the likes of Drupal or WordPress there's either modules that could scan and replace, or worst case someone with SQL skills could interrogate the back end database and perform updates on it to anonymise the posts.
     
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