Ah well, I guess "easy" is relative. I'm sure if you send them one email, they'll confirm it with you once within a month and then delete the data.
Compare that to Coinbase, which has forms, buttons and seems it's mostly an automated process instead of manual email, but I've tried getting Coinbase to delete my account + data for over 6 months now to no avail, multiple emails back and forward where they confirm the deletion, say it's in progress, I email back after a month and they ask me to confirm the deletion again.
So even with a button, doesn't mean the process is easy, and there is also a lot more to consider than just how you initially the request.
This is such a grey area. Do emails others sent to me belong to them? Do my HN comments make the entire conversation partially mine? If one of my comments is "well said", and the parent deletes their comment, is not my comment diminished? What do we do about quotes? Etc.
Solved problem already: Hash the username + a salt and change that everywhere. Every comment is from a unique author + the comment body is still there + all the replies are still there but, author name has been removed.
That's a decent solution. But I think simply replacing the usernames with [deleted] is better. It leaves the comment but detaches the user and breaks the link between all the users comments.
It becomes very hard to track conversations with N+2 users though, if more than one has the [deleted] username. Hence the hashing to get a unique [deleted] username for each user.
Compare that to Coinbase, which has forms, buttons and seems it's mostly an automated process instead of manual email, but I've tried getting Coinbase to delete my account + data for over 6 months now to no avail, multiple emails back and forward where they confirm the deletion, say it's in progress, I email back after a month and they ask me to confirm the deletion again.
So even with a button, doesn't mean the process is easy, and there is also a lot more to consider than just how you initially the request.