Thoughts on deleting member accounts

[martinjwallace]

Today at 10:55 AM Talisman said this in Post #38
Even so.... that's not the issue at question. Someone who posts a message is publishing a creative piece..... it's their own ideas, feelings, intellectual property.... etc. etc. But that's not the case when they provide (very non-creative) data as they fill out a registration form to join our forums. There's no pride of authorship in effect when they're hammering out a username, email address, birthday, and location.

What do you think? The member profiles are given voluntarily as a matter of public record. And I would think that data would be the property of the site administrator. That's who those files belong to.

Unlike copyright law - which is pretty much harmonised across the world, data protection law is still in its infancy. Here in the UK the consumer is in fact well protected - Off hand (I will check this up with the data protection agency when I have a bit more time) I recall that the collected data 'belongs' to the data gatherer, but that they have a duty to the data submitter to ensure acuracy and security of that data. The law also provides for the submitter to request a 'dump' of all collected data and a procedure for 'correction' of that data if it is in anyway incorrect - these rights are supported in law. The data gatherer is also required to explicitly require permission from the submitter if they want to pass the data to a thrid party - again this is supported in law (althought the method is left open).

As a data gatherer you are also required to have a policy detailing what you do with the data, how it is used and what measures you take to ensure its accuracy and security.

Anybody who gathers data from residents of the United Kingdom is required to comply with this Law - The Data Protection Act (1984). How this is enforced when the gatherer is outside the UK I am not sure about.

One thing I am also not certain about is rights concerning total removal of data - which I think is more pertinent to this conversation - I will approach the DPA and see what they have to say on the matter.