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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

#161

Post by _jxdz »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #76
mschuster91 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Germany not; these are required by law (§147 AO, https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/ao_1977/__147.html ) to be kept for ten years. The legal base for allowing this national rule in European law is Art. 6, 1c GDPR.

I think something similar happens in the UK. It's generally believed here that laws telling you to retain data take precedence over the GDPR telling you to delete it. (I am very much not a lawyer, as you can doubtless tell.)

Yes. For example, HMRC requires that you keep various business records for 6 years (or longer, circumstance-specific) after the end of the company's financial year.

Generally, the rule is "Delete the data unless there's a law that requires you not to" — and the UK's implementation of the GDPR (the Data Protection Act 2018) makes various explicit exemptions for this.

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

#162

Post by dbbk »

dorgo wrote: post #84
perl4ever wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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?

Most ORMs have built-in support for this. For example Laravel's Eloquent automatically filters out `deleted_at` records

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

#163

Post by greendestiny_re »

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…

>investor quarterly reports

God forbid the needs of the user harm the interest of the investor.

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

#164

Post by cutemonster »

ecnahc515 wrote: post #118
DevX101 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> keep track of deleted users so that their usernames can't be reused This seems to violate GPDR, no? Attacker attempts to create an account (say: victim@gmail.com) on AshleyMadison and is prevented because the server tracked past users. Attacker could them demonstrate victim@gmail.com was at one point a user on AshleyMadison.com

As others have mentioned, that's an issue already. The solution is to never acknowledge if a user does or doesn't exist on register/sign-up/forgot-password pages and simply state that instructions have been emailed to you in all cases. The key is that you don't act differently if the user does or doesn't exist.

If they don't get a verification / instructions email, they'll know an account with the username they typed, existed?

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

#165

Post by nexuist »

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…

>If a company states in their investor quarterly report that they had 1M active users, they better be able to prove it in an audit.

Is this even legal? I've never heard of a company letting an outside firm go through their database to confirm any sort of statistic like that. Who is doing this auditing?

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

#166

Post by lytefm »

cutemonster wrote: post #164
ecnahc515 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others have mentioned, that's an issue already. The solution is to never acknowledge if a user does or doesn't exist on register/sign-up/forgot-password pages and simply state that instructions have been emailed to you in all cases. The key is that you don't act differently if the user does or doesn't exist.

If they don't get a verification / instructions email, they'll know an account with the username they typed, existed?

You shouldn't use usernames in that scenario, just emails. After Signup, you just show a general message that a confirmation Email has been sent. If the account already exists, some policy to notify the account owner can be put in place.

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

#167

Post by ecnahc515 »

cutemonster wrote: post #164
ecnahc515 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others have mentioned, that's an issue already. The solution is to never acknowledge if a user does or doesn't exist on register/sign-up/forgot-password pages and simply state that instructions have been emailed to you in all cases. The key is that you don't act differently if the user does or doesn't exist.

If they don't get a verification / instructions email, they'll know an account with the username they typed, existed?

In this case, where you're probing for user names or emails, you don't own the email, so you wouldn't receive the verification yourself, and thus wouldn't know if the account exists.

This is exactly why most password reset emails say "if you didn't request this, please let us know, as someone may be attempting to access your account".

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