What I think so many privacy advocates don’t realize while frothing at the mouth is that odds are 99.9999% no one really wants your old photos or data specifically. Surely in large aggregate, but on a macro level you are no more interesting than anyone else. You’re not. You have a delusion of grandeur. Sure, you might get some targeted ads by data used in aggregate and put you into a group but so what? If I had to se…
Ah the old nothing to fear argument.
Oh, there’s plenty to fear, this just isn’t it.
The proliferation of cameras and cellphone tracking hooked to state owned machine learning predicting your decisions - which is publicly happening in China and almost certainly quietly happening everywhere else? Terrifying.
Data collection on crap that’s nearly public anyway? Merely a distraction.
This reminds me of the long conversations that I used to have with family members and friends several years ago. With their continuous requests to create my own Facebook profile so I can keep in contact with them and with their activities as well as to share my whereabouts. I always used the same argument to reject these suggestions — "I don't want Facebook to have too much data about me, more than the data that you…
>I remember the last time I had this conversation with someone, last year (2017) around August. I found a new love partner, and after the long intimate talks on the phone, they requested the usual "intimate pictures", not necessarily sexual but certainly sexy.
Why the fuck are these a thing? Couples don't meet in real life much anymore? And how "usual" are they?
This is why: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/12/ftc-a... https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/snapchats-privac...
Nothing in those articles suggest that Snapchat purged user data. > “resolved most of those concerns over the past year by improving the wording of our privacy policy, app description, and in-app just-in-time notifications.” Snapchat just changed their messaging to quell user concerns. Once they have a critical mass of users, they are immune to disclosing that Snapchat messages are not truly ephemeral.
I understand your skepticism considering the behavior we've seen from some of these companies recently — but when their settlement with the FTC includes an independent company monitoring their handling of user privacy for 20 years, I think it's safe to trust them on this one.
>Snapchat servers are designed to automatically delete all Snaps after they’ve been viewed by all recipients
>Snapchat servers are designed to automatically delete all unopened Snaps after 30 days
Does it make it ok for Facebook to do it just because similar other companies do it? I say no, all of them should delete something I say to delete. And "everyone does it" is makes it a bigger problem, not a smaller one.
Why would they? They implement their system the way they want to. Also, this is a completely logical way to deal with deletions. This is what I would do, (what I have done, when I created a simple CMS system). I don't want an endless quarrel with a customer, who "accidentally" deleted something and wants it back. I just turn the switch and it is back.
We don't soft delete payloads at Raygun ( https://raygun.com ), for the very fact that typically if one of our customers wants to delete something it's because they might have sent something they don't want a third party to have. We have filters and other PII filtering tools etc, but it every now and then something might be sent by mistake. Having said that, you'd be amazed how often folks ask for things to be undele…
It isn’t that hard to combine soft deletes with delayed hard deletes: generate a new encryption key every day for “data deleted today”, and encrypt deleted data with it. After X days, destroy the decryption key. If you use asymmetric encryption, you can keep the group of people who who can recover “deleted data” small. You could even have an independent party generate your encryption key pair, give you the encryption…
Instead of having a key that you delete (and also build non trivial infrastructure to support), why not delete the actual data?
File systems eventually overwrite that data, though. FB's system specifically never reclaims it. Why on earth would you ever do that, unless you have absolutely no respect for your users wishes?
Not standing up for FB's other practices, but from a technical stand point there are several reasons, none of which are about not having respect. - disk space is cheap - deletes are expensive (time) and slow - deletes are harder to scale - can't revert a real delete - delete's don't fit into an event sourcing architecture - append only data is better, more durable I could go on.
Placing technical convenience above user wishes is absolutely a lack of respect for those wishes. All of your reasons essentially come down to "it's not worth the effort".
You mean they follow what many people consider best practices? https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1592... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/820466/never-delete-entr... https://serverfault.com/questions/31455/should-i-ever-delete... https://www.infoq.com/news/2009/09/Do-Not-Delete-Data http://udidahan.com/2009/09/01/dont-delete-just-dont/ https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2549839/are-soft-dele…
The accepted answer to the first link you posted explicitly calls out:
> There is one class of data that you have to delete - and that's personal data that the user doesn't want you to hold any more. There may be local laws (e.g. in the EU) that makes this a mandatory requirement (thanks Gavin)
This is exactly the type of data we're discussing here. So no, contradicting the user's expectation when handling personal data is not a "best practice".
We don't soft delete payloads at Raygun ( https://raygun.com ), for the very fact that typically if one of our customers wants to delete something it's because they might have sent something they don't want a third party to have. We have filters and other PII filtering tools etc, but it every now and then something might be sent by mistake. Having said that, you'd be amazed how often folks ask for things to be undele…
and why offer the false sense of security? if they upload a private key, and delete because they "don't want a third party to have". do you also guarantee it wasn't seen or cached anywhere else? I dont know the details of that product, but I usually treat anything uploaded even once as compromised from that point on.
This is the same argument people used to make for why it was fine for capabilities to be unrevocable--someone could have copied the data anyway (or whatever) so there was no point in revoking it. In reality, most of the time nobody but the host of a deleted item has access to the data, has a way to tie it to the originator, and has a motive to use it, especially without significant effort. Being able to delete things is a very important feature (not to mention a legal requirement in many countries!), and it's disturbing to me how many people seem to want to justify a world where every bit of data is saved, forever.
Why would you believe them after they have lied to you once already?
Right, I wonder how much people trust American companies. Imagine a Chinese firm doing the same and how many will trust them again..
It is best to never have any Chinese company store your data. They are by law (and under severe penalties) required to make all data in their possession available to government officials at any time that it is requested. Dictatorships are like that.