Thanks all. I'll file a complaint locally on harassment grounds and let the government legal system follow it up. I'm sure they'll purge private data quickly enough.
Doubtful. This has been threatened before and no action was taken. Private forum not a govt. owned forum. Good luck though.
If he lives in Europe, something similar to this is actually somewhat possible due to 'right to be forgotten' (e.g. anti-freedom of speech) laws. I am not sure if the forum specifically would be covered, however search engines would be forced to purge information related to his specific identity in certain circumstances.
Highly doubtful but I would love to see it tried.
It looks like it mainly applies to search engine results (e.g. google). From
Right to be forgotten - WikipediaIn Article 12 of the Directive 95/46/EC the EU gave a legal base to internet protection for individuals.[3]:233 In 2012 the European Commission disclosed a draft European Data Protection Regulation to supersede the directive, which includes specific protection in the right to be forgotten in Article 17.[19]
To exercise the Right to be Forgotten and request removal from a search engine, one must complete a form through the search engine’s website. Google’s removal request process requires the applicant to identify their country of residence, personal information, a list of the URL’s to be removed along with a short description of each one, and attachment of legal identification.[20] The applicant receives an email from Google confirming the request but the request must be assessed before it is approved for removal. If the request is approved, the link is removed from search results but the content, however, remains online and is not completely erased.
The content must contain personal information, so I don't think a forum handle would qualify, unless the handle contains the 'real name' of the person publishing the content.
I think it is very much not a good law/policy for the EU to implement.
According to various WSJ news reports over the past several months, google has only censored search results when people accessed google via EU based domains (like google.de), and when people searched for something that should have been censored via a non-EU based domain (like google.com) the results would still show up.
Ironically, several news outlets actually wrote news articles about previous news articles that were sometimes decades old that reflected unfavorably on EU citizens when they received notification that various search engines were removing search results about the sometimes decades old articles.
