31–40 of 205 posts
I want to know if the photos are securely deleted. It's not enough that the mere reference to a file is gone. I want everything overwritten with zeroes, and the photo made properly irrecoverable.
They are definitely not. I’m honestly surprised at how many folks here on HN (a presumably tech savvy crowd) think that Instagram (or any tech co) is “writing zeros” when a user hits a delete button.
> "The researcher reported an issue where someone’s deleted Instagram images and messages would be included in a copy of their information (...) We’ve fixed the issue" This makes it sound like they consider "you could see it" the issue, not "we were still keeping it". In other words, the fix was to hide it, not to delete it. If I were the Irish DPA (and actually wanted to do my job and had the resources to, instead o…
Ohh do I have some bad news for you.
Seemingly everyone in this industry can’t or won’t design databases and applications to actually allow for data to be deleted.
Few months ago I requested my data from Discord. Interestingly enough, it didn't include my messages from server that was deleted some time before that.
Deleted files hang out longer but are gone within a month.
Tomorrow at slate "How instagram permanent delete perpetuates white supremacy"
There is no policy that could satisfy all.
This sort of practice is not limited to just Instagram. Plenty of places that do soft deletes when they should be doing hard deletes. Data life-cycles are about the poorest understood subject in startup land. Ingestion is usually top notch, friction free and heavily automated. Deletion - assuming it even exists - is semi automatic or even manual, full of friction and usually incomplete or broken. You see a similar pa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A fine for what? Not fixing a minor bug in a timely fashion? That’s not a road we want to travel down.
This is not a 'minor bug'. This is a major oversight and possibly a regulatory issue. The user owns the data. The user has rights.
So removed from other person's chat. Still associated with your account
I have my account data from last year. Time to dig into it and sue instagram.
Oh wait. I'm not in the EU. I'm in India, where they can even sell my info. So they definitely didn't delete it
We know that HN is visited by a fair share of Facebook employees. Can some of you weigh in (anonymously?) on this topic? Do you guys do hard deletes of user data instead of just soft deletes? If so, are logs or backups kept? For how long? In other words: if I'm a user of $POPULAR_SERVICE and I delete my account at time t0, is there a t1 > t0 after which every trace of my data is gone from the platform? My (cynical) g…
I want to know if the photos are securely deleted. It's not enough that the mere reference to a file is gone. I want everything overwritten with zeroes, and the photo made properly irrecoverable.
> When you delete something from Instagram you expect it to be gone for good Ohh do I have some bad news for you. Seemingly everyone in this industry can’t or won’t design databases and applications to actually allow for data to be deleted.