How to delete an account? (the ability to do this is a legal requirement)

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I could not find any way to do this, just a post that seems to indicate it is impossible.

However, I am pretty sure that according to EU regulations you would be required by law to allow everyone to not just delete their account, but also all their data you may have stored about them.

I therefore want to know how to achieve this on this forum.

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I’ll suggest you scan How can I delete my discourse account? for clues.

As users may have contributed to discussions in threads; the removal of parts of a thread tends to destroy what is left, thus the preference of anonymization.

It’s a one-way process however (it’ll be impossible for anyone to prove they were that anonymized user, including moderators). Send a message to the group moderators.

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That workaround still is unlawful according to EU regulations though because it does not guarantee that person-related data is actually removed from this site’s discourse server.

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I’m just a voluntary contributor and helping as moderator here, so please correct if I’m wrong.

I think one thing is personal data (name, email and other private identifiable data) and another thing is contributions to this forum. I think contributions are in some sort of Creative Commons license. I would say it is like if you are contributing to some open source project with one of the usual licenses and suddenly you decide to withdraw your code.

In that sense, removing the private identifiable data and anonymizing the contributions I would say does not violate the EU regulations, but please correct me anybody more knowledgeable if I’m wrong.

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Legal questions should be referred, on paper, to Canonical’s legal team in London.
They will not post legal opinions here, and will not respond to legal questions here.

The current (2025) position of the Ubuntu Discourse staff, which is not legal advice, is that:

  • Most of the conversation on Ubuntu Discourse does not meet the GDPR definition of “personal data.” The data does not identify you. The data is not about you.

  • Anonymization meets GDPR requirements for removal of personal data. Once anonymized, no data remains in the Discourse server to identify who you are or about you.

  • In most cases we are unwilling to delete all conversation posts by a user because it scrambles those conversations. It confuses future readers and frustrates future historians.

  • Before asking for anonymization, we ask users to scrub their posts to edit those that include personal information within conversations. Staff won’t do this for you, as you have the tools to do it yourself. If you cannot edit a post (too old), flag it for staff review.

    This is not carte blanche to delete your historical posts – that is vandalism, and we may roll back your edits after suspending your account.

  • When ready, simply send a PM @moderators requesting anonymization. When done, your Discourse login account, which includes all of your non-conversation personal information, won’t exist anymore. This is permanent and cannot be undone. Folks who have done this in a fit of pique must live with the consequences.

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