It's not a silver bullet of course. Discord, for instance, just 'anonymises' message history by renaming your account to Deleted User. But most people's message history is enough to deanonymise them, making that completely null and void. If you ask for your messages to actually be deleted they will refuse your request.

I published a tool on GitHub for deleting message history in the most efficient way I could find. Yet users of the tool sometimes get their accounts banned because Discord's TOS prohibits unauthorised use of their API. I speculate this is because they don't want custom clients which don't send back telemetry.

Discord is either tone-deaf to common privacy concerns or they're completely conscious of them and don't want people to clear their message history.

One tactic I've worked out with individual mods is I have them ban me, then unban me, which causes all of my posts to be erased from the public chat. Of course Discord probably still has them privately, but it's better than nothing.

That's interesting, thanks for the tip. I would hope they would have a sort of garbage collection that deletes orphaned messages, but this is Discord we're talking about.

Are they owned by Microsoft yet?

I don’t think this will be enough in case they get sued if the messages contain personably identifiable information they will have serious problems.

How does the EU enforce the deletion of said data from Facebook servers standing on US ground?

How do I enforce deletion if I have unwittingly only a "shadow account" in Facebook?

Fine the Facebook subsidiaries incorporated in the EU. Or completely ban them from doing business, which prevents advertisers in the EU from giving them money.

This is impossible - the fine would have to be absurdly high to matter and if they disabled their business in the EU there would be riots. Facebook can essentially do whatever they want as they are also likely sending information to services.

> This is impossible - the fine would have to be absurdly high to matter

Fines here are proportional to profits, so it would be absurdly high for Facebook.

> and if they disabled their business in the EU there would be riots.

Not really. In the last five years I've seen an ever growing anti American sentiment around here. I guess it's because all the antics that were coming from the angry Cheeto.

America is now seen as unstable and unreliable. The sentiment around here is basically (generally speaking): "and what happens of they decide to elect (another) Trump again?"

> if they disabled their business in the EU there would be riots.

Line em up.

California Privacy Act also gives you similar rights.

Not really: https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/.

Not if the Irish have any say in the matter.