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Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on its servers for more than a year

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Re: Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on its servers for more than a year

#41

Post by School-Cotton »

tdons wrote: post #9

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 have actually worked at Facebook, but not on deletions. So I’m probably better informed than the other random speculation in the comments replying to you, but still, take it with a grain of salt.

My understanding is that deletion is a hard problem with entire teams working on it (imagine how many different random systems data flows to...) but that yes, the intended behavior is for deleted data to really be gone after 30 days. This is necessary to comply with GDPR and various other laws.

Of course, if two people each own a copy of a piece of data (for example, messages person A sent to person B), then person A deleting their copy won’t affect person B’s copy (just like how emails work).

Contrary to popular belief, Facebook doesn’t actually have anything to gain from nefariously storing data you delete. Ad targeting has plenty of non-deleted data to train on; Facebook has no incentive to break the law to keep tiny amounts of dubiously useful extra data on the margins. I’m almost certain the issue described here was genuinely a bug.

Re: Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on its servers for more than a year

#42

Post by School-Cotton »

rco8786 wrote: post #15
tdons wrote: post #9

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…

Soft deletes. This is always the case. Not just at Facebook, it is just standard practice across tech co’s.

Do you have a source?

Re: Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on its servers for more than a year

#43

Post by jacquesm »

ffpip wrote: post #37
jacquesm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Instagram doesnt use the word 'delete'. It uses 'unsent' for messages. 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

Pulling linguistic tricks typically does not amuse regulators.

Re: Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on its servers for more than a year

#44

Post by School-Cotton »

gitgud wrote: post #38
tdons wrote: post #9

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…

Deletion is a risk. It's much safer to just say it's deleted...

Do you have a source?

Re: Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on its servers for more than a year

#45

Post by School-Cotton »

lend000 wrote: post #10
tdons wrote: post #9

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…

DELETED=TRUE

[flagged]

Re: Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on its servers for more than a year

#46

Post by ffpip »

shahsyed wrote: post #16
ffpip wrote: post #2

Oh they fully delete those? I didn't actually expect messages to be erased when we un-send it.

I genuinely laughed at this - I thought the same thing! If you ever downloaded your own account data, I think OP and other concerned posters would understand how much data companies retain and this wouldn't come off as a surprise. Snapchat data for example, has chat logs, snap history, what accounts you've added/requested as a friend, and friends that have added you all retained. I bring this up as an example because…

I did download it. Before deleting my account. Just put it in a hard drive since it had all messages, photos.

Time to dig into it.

Re: Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on its servers for more than a year

#47

Post by School-Cotton »

jacquesm wrote: post #25
robjan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how most services work at scale. It's much cheaper to set a flag than actually delete an entry in a database. The data can then be scrubbed by some periodic maintenance process.

Only that doesn't typically happen. It just sits there, for years or until the company goes bust. The typical reasoning is that marketing wants to hold on to the data, they will never ever say 'ok, enough, you may delete it' because there is this infinitely small chance that they can re-activate an account, market to it for some other product (no matter that that is against the GDPR) or to sell the data to some third…

[flagged]

Re: Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on its servers for more than a year

#49

Post by xwdv »

jacquesm wrote: post #21

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…

Everyone thinks deletion is so simple and straight forward until you start dealing with the cascading effects and edge cases.

Re: Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on its servers for more than a year

#50

Post by jacquesm »

xwdv wrote: post #49
jacquesm wrote: post #21

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…

Everyone thinks deletion is so simple and straight forward until you start dealing with the cascading effects and edge cases.

Yes, especially backups and log files are hard. The databases are relatively easy if they allow for in place overwrites or compaction of tables. Even then you have to be careful.

Data is funny that way. It is easy to acquire, easy to lose if you want to keep it and devilishly hard to get rid of for real if that is what you want to do.

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