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.
Do they keep audio record?
Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on its servers for more than a year
61–70 of 205 posts
Re: Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on its servers for more than a year
#62I don't know how many times this is going to have to happen before people understand this: when you put something online, assume it is essentially public. Forever. If you don't want it to be public forever, don't put it online.
This is victim blaming and only reinforces the status quo. The way things are isn't the way things have to be. We can change the rules if we work together. Or we can give up and blame the victims.
I think it's more pragmatic advice than anything, even if all these websites deleted your data properly there'd be snapshots and pictures and backups around forever.
Re: Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on its servers for more than a year
#63This 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…
I think just about everything should be a soft delete, however you need a time limit where you sweep those. Ideally you would even give the user an option to accelerate that (as much as technically possible) if they really want something gone.
That would be one way to implement a data life cycle that would probably meet with regulators approval, but it depends on lots of little details and the length of that 'time limit'.
Re: Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on its servers for more than a year
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The vast majority of companies I've seen consider issuing "SQL DELETE" is sufficient for GDPR compliance.
One day, they will be burned when some investigation finds out that those rows are still sitting in uncompacted tables, or on now-unallocated disk blocks, or on now-remapped SSD sectors.
The only way to be sure the data is deleted is to copy all the data you want to keep to a new drive and burn the old one. Anything less and there is a reasonable chance an expert could recover at least some of the deleted info.
Re: Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on its servers for more than a year
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did I claim that Facebook never really deletes data? I just answered the GP, maybe you have your threads mixed up? But if I were to speculate I would say that if Instagram does what the article title says that you could already make that claim about Facebook since they are a part of it.
We’re in a thread that specifically asks whether Facebook really does hard deletes, so I took your comment as claiming they don’t. > 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?
"This is how most services work at scale."
Re: Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on its servers for more than a year
#66We 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 aft…
If you weren't working on deletions it would seem to me that you are not better informed at all.
The rest of what you write is an open book to anybody in tech. And whether Facebook has anything to gain or not from nefariously storing data you delete is a much lighter shade of gray than building up shadow profiles, profiles on people without an account.
https://theconversation.com/shadow-profiles-facebook-knows-a...
Re: Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on its servers for more than a year
#67Re: Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on its servers for more than a year
#68We 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.
Google takes deletes seriously. Extreme efforts go into deleting stuff within 30 days of the user requesting deletion.
Imagine how hard that is when a datacenter is switched off for 14 days for maintenance, and then a fire breaks out and takes it offline for a further 20 days... When something is powered off, it's very hard to do those deletions... Yet misses of the deadline are exceedingly rare, even in cases like the above.
Sometimes disks are crushed in a crusher to meet the deadline if software approaches to deletion can't be done in time.
Re: Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on its servers for more than a year
#69I 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.
If you want security guarantees, find a service that makes them. Expect to pay more for the additional work it takes to deliver them.
Re: Instagram kept deleted photos and messages on its servers for more than a year
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Soft deletes are generally a good idea. Being to recover data for some time is very useful. Ideally this is also exposed to users. However respectable companies will keep this time-limited. For example Google has very strict deadlines on all of their deleted data wiping. Their privacy policy is quite vague but gives some examples: https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention