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Instead of deleting account, NYT appends ‘1000’ to username and email address

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Re: Instead of deleting account, NYT appends ‘1000’ to username and email address

#131

Post by lilyball »

perl4ever wrote: post #91
dorgo wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>On the other hand, "is deleted" flags end up causing issues when you forget to put "where not is_deleted" in your queries. My solution would be a view for every table. Are there drawbacks? Other solutions?

Eh, the situation that I've been in, if I recall correctly, is that one has read/write access to all data for reporting, but not the ability to create views (or stored procedures etc) to share. Where I am now, (as far as Oracle goes) you can't even create your own tables under your own schema. A view requires a meeting with a DBA and their manager and really special, compelling arguments.

Can you just have a general policy where every table that has an is_deleted flag also automatically gets a view, and clients must use the view unless they have a particular need to access deleted data?

Re: Instead of deleting account, NYT appends ‘1000’ to username and email address

#132

Post by jasonbarone »

samthecoy wrote: post #39
mistyq wrote: post #4

How was it possible to discover it, though?

From the twitter comments: https://twitter.com/bicycult/status/1255122953798328320 They were still logged in and refreshed the page; they found out by going to their user settings.

I've seen this same method used on multiples apps I've requested an account deletion on. It's super frustrating. Most companies either don't respond back, say they deleted it when they merely disabled it, or they updated the account name to something else.

Re: Instead of deleting account, NYT appends ‘1000’ to username and email address

#135

Post by Terr_ »

perl4ever wrote: post #70
DevX101 wrote: post #64

Doing real deletes on user accounts is a surprisingly challenging problem and I'd be willing to bet very few companies do real deletes where all of your data is wiped permanently from the company. For legal and financial reasons, companies often need to keep track of historical user activity. If a company states in their investor quarterly report that they had 1M active users, they better be able to prove it in an au…

I used to work where (not a service for the general public) there was an "is deleted" flag for everything, but every now and then a client would insist that data be really deleted, and depending on who it was and how they asked, we might go and do it, which was a huge hassle and would cause no end of problems down the line. On the other hand, "is deleted" flags end up causing issues when you forget to put "where not…

I also worked at a similar place, and fantasized about rewriting everything so that soft-deletion wasn't a per-row technical detail, but was instead an explicit modeled business-flow. Perhaps stored as a flag on an Aggregate Root (like "Customer" or "Project") at a much coarser level of detail. Sure, your queries still need to account for it, but at least you don't have a potential patchwork of inconsistent flags.

P.S.: Random advice to anybody working on enterprisey stuff:

1. "Deletion" is too vague and broad. I strongly suggest you call it "deactivation" and some other word like "purging."

2. Deactivation is typically what a company actually wants, even if they don't know to ask for it. By phrasing it that way you also encourage stakeholders to think about "reactivation" before it becomes an architectural problem.

3. True purging is rare, and tends to be related to either disk-space issues or legal requirements. In the latter case, you'll want an audit-trail or tombstone of some sort, meaning it's still a real workflow and not just an easy SQL DELETE statement or something.

Re: Instead of deleting account, NYT appends ‘1000’ to username and email address

#136

Post by [deleted] »

bagacrap wrote: post #42
polote wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not an issue as long as there is no tld which ends with 1000 though

"the number was appended to local-part, not the domain. I found out by going back to a tab where my session was still valid but the account dropdown had updated with the new name. Profile settings revealed the email."

[deleted]

Re: Instead of deleting account, NYT appends ‘1000’ to username and email address

#137

Post by ska »

jackcosgrove wrote: post #108
DevX101 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did a glance through that thread and it didn't seem like there was a strong consensus on how to respect GPDR while maintaining historical data for reporting purposes. Any best practices?

Having worked in a HIPAA regulated space, I can say that hashing the username, such as the email address, for login purposes can allow for account recovery if the credentials are retained. At the same time the cleartext username and other PII can be stored in an object that is both encrypted at rest for its lifetime, and on top of that has its sensitive fields overwritten upon logical deletion. Account recovery canno…

Yes this is all quite do-able. It is often much easier to implement from the beginning, than after the fact.

Re: Instead of deleting account, NYT appends ‘1000’ to username and email address

#138

Post by cryptonector »

DevX101 wrote: post #64

Doing real deletes on user accounts is a surprisingly challenging problem and I'd be willing to bet very few companies do real deletes where all of your data is wiped permanently from the company. For legal and financial reasons, companies often need to keep track of historical user activity. If a company states in their investor quarterly report that they had 1M active users, they better be able to prove it in an au…

In general you don't want to delete absolutely everything. For example, usernames should not be reused, so you can't "delete" them -- you can tombstone them though, and you should. Besides tombstoning to prevent reuse, you can and should delete as much associated metadata as you're willing to / contractually or legally required, naturally.

Even what you can delete can (and will) survive in logs and backups, web archives, screenshots, etc. Deleting things on the Internet is just difficult.

Re: Instead of deleting account, NYT appends ‘1000’ to username and email address

#139

Post by cryptonector »

ericd wrote: post #123
Dahoon wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But an email is PII so clearly this would breach GDPR.

Keep a hash instead of the original email address?

Whatever for? Just delete it. Keep the account tombstoned so its name can't be reused. Keep what content you can and want. Delete the PII and any metadata you're contractually and/or legally required to.

Re: Instead of deleting account, NYT appends ‘1000’ to username and email address

#140

Post by avree »

petercooper wrote: post #48
paulcole wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He said in his tweet about this that when he does it to Europeans (specifically Germans, I think) they just get even madder. I mean great if there are legal requirements for invoices, but who enforces them, how likely is enforcement, and what’s the end result for a US-based company with no physical presence in The Netherlands?

The real issue is with the local (European) company when they claim the expense against profits and the tax inspector turns their nose up at the invoice/receipt. Being in the UK, we tend to work on a system where things are taken in context and you can defend such decisions. Maybe other tax regimes are more restrictive, but the British way is always that you can have a debate with authorities and usually they will se…

Just to make this kind of confusing story less confusing—the Pinboard guy prints valid invoices (in order to be legally compliant, and because he's "not a totally evil guy"). Someone (from Germany) asked him to add Company Name to the invoice, and he replied by saying "just edit the HTML to add whatever you need".

https://twitter.com/i/status/1192182812121583617 The actual tweets probably explain it better than I (and the parent comment) can.

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