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I am currently developing a Website which allows users to create Blog-posts and was wondering whether I should allow them to delete their Posts from the Database. On one hand, they could be writing illegal stuff and delete it shortly afterwards, which would make it impossible to follow up on this issue afterwards, on the other I might have to provide such a feature. I was thinking about implementing a "soft-deletion", which allows users to mark a posts as deleted and deleting all marked posts after a couple of weeks.

My question now is whether this approach would be legal, especially considering the GDPR. How would you go about it?

I'm aware that I might be in the wrong community (Stackoverflow) here and am open for suggestions for other forums.

Edit The website is hosted and has its Guests mostly in Germany. Does anybody know about the lokal laws and how they play for this problem?

Sarius
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  • I'm closing this question as off-topic because it is not about a practical programming problem as outlined in the [help/on-topic]. – Martijn Pieters Oct 24 '20 at 16:20

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GDPR is only concerned with personal data, which is data connected with people, so if I write a blog post that doesn't contain any personal data, GDPR simply doesn't enter into it except for identifying me as its author. With that link removed, it's just regular data.

If you consider the blog post along with its author identification as a single item, then it would count as personal data, and they could ask for it to be deleted. There is some wiggle room for practicality here though. You can reasonably do as you suggest and soft delete now and really delete later, but you should make it clear in your privacy policy that that is what you are going to do. You could cite a reasonable case of legitimate interest to allow for letting data fall off the end of backup cycles, allowing a grace period for them to change their mind, accidental deletion, and abuse.

A separate issue is copyright, which remains with the author regardless of whether they are credited (unless for example they write it under contract to you and waived their rights or assigned ownership to you).

Synchro
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