Whilst posting about GDPR, I take the opportunity to remind members of the forum policy regarding some of the GDPR policies namely:
The right to restrict processing
You have a right to ‘block’ or suppress processing of personal data. When processing is restricted, we are permitted to store the personal data, but not further process it.
Our data processing is as restricted as possible. Processing generally requires you to act on our website, therefore not using the website will cease such processing.
As above, processing requires you to act on our website as a logged in member. Once you are logged out then there is no further processing by the server.
The right to erase
The right to erasure is also known as ‘the right to be forgotten’. The broad principle underpinning this right is to enable you to request the deletion or removal of personal data where there is no compelling reason for its continued processing.
On the forum, this can be dealt with by requesting to delete your account. A deletion will have to be approved by an administrator (to protect against accounts being deleted maliciously). We will deal with this by transferring your username to a Guest account which has no user associated profile and all posts previously made will be attributed to the Guest account.
Blanket removal of individual posts is not seen as a compelling reason as it breaks up the thread and seriously affects readability and continuity of technical information data for our other members. We may also consider a change of username if this is preferred.
We do not blanket remove all posts for the reasons stated above, but are willing to remove or edit individual posts that may contain personally identifying information.
Anonymity If you wish to retain anonymity - for example if you have used your real name instead of an alias - then admin can change your 'display name'. The display name is self explanatory, but to clarify this is the name appended to any posts you make.
Personal data & account deletionThe forum has no facility for members to delete their account themselves. However, this can be done by a forum administrator. We do this by re-assigning your account to a [special] guest account that will remove all personal data from our servers (such as email and IP addresses) and will asign the attribute 'guest' to any posts you have made in the past. Because this action assigns you to a guest account that has no personal data, the database treats your posts and any other deleted accounts as the same account. As such, there is absolutely no going back from this action.
The only personal data that we do hold on our servers for members is your email address & any IP addresses associated with any posts you make. Both of these and any other information such as user/display name, av, forum signature, registration date etc are deleted when merging to the guest account.
If you wish, you can download a copy of your personal data from Profile > Actions > Download profile data.
Any posts you have made can be viewed from Profile > Profile Info > Show Posts.
