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Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

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Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#351

Post by lucb1e »

jlmorton wrote: post #103
WovenTales wrote: post #33

The most unsettling part is in Facebook's response: “We’ve heard that when accessing their information from our Download Your Information tool, some people are seeing their old videos that do not appear on their profile or Activity Log. We are investigating.” Who wants to bet against their investigation being “how to keep users from seeing it.” Anyone?

I honestly don't understand this cynicism. Facebook does not want your deleted video, and they certainly don't want to keep it given the current media frenzy, with the CEO under fire. Every application of any complexity has features which inactivate, but don't delete data. At Facebook scale, deleting data is non-trivial, and it would be impossible to immediately delete something. We all have bugs, including extremely…

> Facebook does not want your deleted video

Oh, most certainly they do want that video. Their business is knowing who we are and what drives us, so they can target those ads better. That's what makes their shareholders money.

That the people working there are human beings who might consider it immoral to keep deleted material, is what most people rely on when using such services... but being kind is not Facebook's goal.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#352

Post by kerkeslager »

_acme wrote: post #292
kerkeslager wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users didn't accept anything just because they checked a checkbox next to a link to an ever-changing jumble of legalese to get past a screen. This isn't agreement, it's manufactured consent.

Unfortunately no matter how many times you say this or how much you wish it were true, US (at least) courts have disagreed with you by enforcing contracts of adhesion.

I think we're in agreement, we're just saying things slightly differently. I believe human rights exist and are an ethical imperative whether or not lawmakers/courts choose to protect human rights.

Or put another way, the law should be (but often isn't) informed by human rights--human rights aren't informed by the law.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#353

Post by kerkeslager »

xtrapolate wrote: post #270
samstave wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fucking stupid policy - so they have 90 days to off load your shit to Utah/gov-cloud before they “delete” your data? Who can possibly believe this BS. Imagine you wanted to delete data of your own Sustem - but when you hit rm it takes 90 days to execute - this sentiment PISSES me off. When I say “delete me from your service now” I have a reasonable expectation that you will delete it. C’mon

Do you think it's as easy as "rm"-ing a file away? Your data is kept internally in a multitude of different databases. Parts of it sitting in cold storage. Log files, caches. That data is split across thousands of different nodes. Each system has different data retention policies. Some databases don't permit removal of a specific record - the records must "expire" first. It really does take time to delete data.

True, but this isn't an excuse. It's slow to delete data because Facebook designed it that way. They could have designed for privacy and real-time deletion of data, but they didn't, because they didn't care.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#354

Post by xtrapolate »

kerkeslager wrote: post #353
xtrapolate wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think it's as easy as "rm"-ing a file away? Your data is kept internally in a multitude of different databases. Parts of it sitting in cold storage. Log files, caches. That data is split across thousands of different nodes. Each system has different data retention policies. Some databases don't permit removal of a specific record - the records must "expire" first. It really does take time to delete data.

True, but this isn't an excuse. It's slow to delete data because Facebook designed it that way. They could have designed for privacy and real-time deletion of data, but they didn't, because they didn't care.

> "They could have designed for privacy and real-time deletion of data"

Actually, they could not. If data is geo-replicated across multiple clusters, spread all over the place, divided into hot and cold storage layers - it's crystal clear you can't perform "real time deletion of data". Instantaneous deletion of all data, leaving no trace behind, can not happen under such complex constraints.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#355

Post by kerkeslager »

icebraining wrote: post #260
samstave wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fucking stupid policy - so they have 90 days to off load your shit to Utah/gov-cloud before they “delete” your data? Who can possibly believe this BS. Imagine you wanted to delete data of your own Sustem - but when you hit rm it takes 90 days to execute - this sentiment PISSES me off. When I say “delete me from your service now” I have a reasonable expectation that you will delete it. C’mon

It's interesting that you think they need those 90 days to off load your data. As if they hadn't done so before your deletion. By the way, rm does work like that. The file will just be marked as deleted (by removing its entry from the filesystem index), but will remain on your disk for some time afterwards, from some minutes to months. If you want to ensure deletion, you should be using shred.

> By the way, rm does work like that. The file will just be marked as deleted (by removing its entry from the filesystem index), but will remain on your disk for some time afterwards, from some minutes to months. If you want to ensure deletion, you should be using shred.

This is true, but it's worth noting that not overwriting your own data on a machine you physically own as an optimization is very different behavior from not overwriting someone else's data on your server when they request that you delete it.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#356

Post by joefreeman »

dustingetz wrote: post #316
crdoconnor wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking the other day that GDPR might make event sourcing problematic.

https://docs.datomic.com/on-prem/excision.html

"You are strongly encouraged to backup a database before excising data."

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#357

Post by Someone »

skj wrote: post #335
Someone wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because the key is smaller, it is easier to make sure you deleted every copy of that key than that you deleted every copy of the data. The data also might be part of a larger backup that you would have to take apart and reassemble in order to delete the data, or might be in a place where doing that is costly (e.g. on Amazon Glacier)

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#358

Post by stickdogg »

Someone wrote: post #317
traskjd wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Absolutely!

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#359

Post by russdpale »

traskjd wrote: post #249
noobermin wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allow me to ask the obvious question. Who doesn't do the something like this? Not to alleviate facebook of blame, but who's to say data on almost every other social media service isn't also just flagged for deletion?

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…

That's great you guys do that. But it cant be proven, why take your word for it?

Ultimately, its the trust that is ghe problem, and that is what needs to be removed eother through new technology or legislation or both.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#360

Post by icebraining »

kerkeslager wrote: post #355
icebraining wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that you think they need those 90 days to off load your data. As if they hadn't done so before your deletion. By the way, rm does work like that. The file will just be marked as deleted (by removing its entry from the filesystem index), but will remain on your disk for some time afterwards, from some minutes to months. If you want to ensure deletion, you should be using shred.

> By the way, rm does work like that. The file will just be marked as deleted (by removing its entry from the filesystem index), but will remain on your disk for some time afterwards, from some minutes to months. If you want to ensure deletion, you should be using shred. This is true, but it's worth noting that not overwriting your own data on a machine you physically own as an optimization is very different behavior…

I couldn't agree more.
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