This won’t apply to every community and I feel it becomes a big admin task as it’s not designed into the community software that people use.
How easy will you make it for people to leave the community? And what are the consequences of data they’ve left behind or requested to be removed?
This example is from Mentor Cruise. I like how they’ve put it as “I resign”.
Wavelength!
I saw the churn conversation – probably on Slack – and it got me thinking about this.
My understanding of the GDPR is that users must have the ability to request deletion of their data. Removing a community account would fall under that.
My interpretation of Article 17 is that this removal would apply to any identifiable information. So profile data would be removed, but the content of public posts would remain.
In which case, the user’s profile data would be wiped, perhaps flipping the username/public name to “Deleted User” or “Former Member”, akin to what Reddit does with deleted accounts.
Yes, the tricky part is managing that, or not having it built in. It’s actually rare that people end up requesting that and ideally it should be built into the platform…but with usage of varying platforms and data everywhere, the experience isn’t ideal.
I wonder to what extent chat/forum/community platforms support or enable this.
Huge advocate of having a simple process for self-removal from a community. Wrote about a while ago, but I agree, platforms all focus on making signup super smooth, the same should be said for removing members. I don’t want to be a lifetime member simply because there is no process to removing my data as a former member.
