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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

#141

Post by foepys »

luckylion wrote: post #98
jacquesm wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the goal is compliance, not to put companies out of business. When the laws were first enacted everybody was screaming that it was just to put companies out of business. Now they are wondering why the small initial fines. It's simple: change your ways and use the initial fines as a wake up call. If you then do not wake up and persist the fines will get heavier and heavier until you will pay attention. A Dutch…

> Because the goal is compliance, not to put companies out of business. There's middle ground between "we take 100% of your revenue" and "we take 0.001% of your revenue". Given that we're not this lenient with private citizens and small companies, why should we be with international corporations?

It's not 100%. The fine can get up to 4% global revenue or 20 million Euro, whichever is higher.

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

#142

Post by mschuster91 »

jacquesm wrote: post #95
rco8786 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.

Sorry, but no. That is a deletion request. The GDPR tells you exactly what to do once such a request is made. There is no such thing as a 'specific GDPR deletion request'.

In case of a lawsuit your chances are better if you exactly state that you want a deletion pursuant to Article 17 of GDPR.

Only stating you want your data to be deleted leaves the counterpart wiggle room.

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

#143

Post by jermier »

ben509 wrote: post #71
m4tthumphrey wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this something you would actually expect from a media sharing/storage site?

Not wanting data shared seems to contradict the mission of a site that shares data.

So what if someone sleuths around in the e-waste dept. of Instagram and steals a few hard-drives with literally Terabytes of potentially very sensitive data? That's why I would hope Instagram are encrypting data at rest with something like LUKS.

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

#144

Post by endtime »

holidayacct wrote: post #116

Whenever someone publishes an article like this, I want them to find out what its like when you reach the threshold of 100000 individual delete requests per second which ends up being five million actual deletes when you factor in all of the associated references to the item being deleted and its metadata. Then I want them to find out what happens when you have to propagate those deletes across geographically distrib…

Google has an internal standard for how long it takes to wipe out user data after a deletion request, and compliance with it is taken very seriously. It's a lot less than 1 year.

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

#145

Post by ethanwillis »

holidayacct wrote: post #129
kuschku wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've got 30 days to delete data, there's no excuse not to manage it within 30 days. Also, you're saying they intentionally built a software stack without even thinking about how to obey the law (the 30-day deletion requirement existed even before the GDPR, since 1996 even, just with lower fines) I hope in a few years this case will be taught in school just like the Therac case is being taught right now.

It's not that simple, some of these companies have tech stacks that are run-a-way trains written by people who had good intentions but wrote their code and built their infrastructure in a way that was meant for 1/50th of the traffic they currently have. I don't know anything about instagram's infrastructure but what I can tell you for certain is that every one of these companies has legacy infrastructure and code tha…

If they don't want to comply with laws then they shouldn't be operating.

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

#146

Post by dhdhhdd »

holidayacct wrote: post #116

Whenever someone publishes an article like this, I want them to find out what its like when you reach the threshold of 100000 individual delete requests per second which ends up being five million actual deletes when you factor in all of the associated references to the item being deleted and its metadata. Then I want them to find out what happens when you have to propagate those deletes across geographically distrib…

If you can insert... for sure you can delete? It doesn't take days for your picture to show up.

Sure, eventual consistency and replication and distributed storage is hard.

Alternative approach: encrypt at rest, delete encryption key. It would require extra resources for sure, but if privacy was a concern... ;-) (and then have a reasonable expiry on your CDN if you use one).

(of course then we can argue that deleting the encryption key may be difficult too, for the same reasons)

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

#147

Post by jacquesm »

mschuster91 wrote: post #142
jacquesm wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but no. That is a deletion request. The GDPR tells you exactly what to do once such a request is made. There is no such thing as a 'specific GDPR deletion request'.

In case of a lawsuit your chances are better if you exactly state that you want a deletion pursuant to Article 17 of GDPR. Only stating you want your data to be deleted leaves the counterpart wiggle room.

That's true, but regulators operate outside of that and will take the intent rather than the letter of the law to heart, and the GDPR is quite specific in its language.

A person who may decide to bring suit however should always cite chapter and verse to lay down the line and to indicate that they are very serious about it. Just the fact that you would be citing that article will likely give you a better chance of seeing your request honored. But if your request is refused and you decide to tip off a regulator it won't make all that much of a difference, they will do their own investigation outside of the particular case and may broaden/narrow the scope of that investigation as they see fit.

This has already surprised more than one company by the way, they decided to play fast and loose with a single individual and as a result found their whole infra and processes under review with plenty of things found out of order. Fines were handed out that were higher than what it would have cost to arrange things properly in the first place.

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

#148

Post by jacquesm »

foepys wrote: post #141
luckylion wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because the goal is compliance, not to put companies out of business. There's middle ground between "we take 100% of your revenue" and "we take 0.001% of your revenue". Given that we're not this lenient with private citizens and small companies, why should we be with international corporations?

It's not 100%. The fine can get up to 4% global revenue or 20 million Euro, whichever is higher.

There is still some unclarity as to whether or not multiple fines can be issued for different transgressions, there hasn't been such a case yet and nobody has gotten close to the limit so for now this is still grey. But I think that once fined at that level no sane CEO is going to risk getting a second such fine in the same year or even at all.

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

#149

Post by jacquesm »

mschuster91 wrote: post #138
jacquesm wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All it takes is one dataleak[+] to blow that wide open. Secure erase is hard. But what is much less hard is to encrypt data and then to limit the problem to getting rid of the decryption key. This reduces the problem in scope to one single datum rather than a whole chain of possible plaintext copies. Secure erase is a contractual requirement for many relationships, it is interesting that none of the major db vendors…

> But what is much less hard is to encrypt data and then to limit the problem to getting rid of the decryption key. This reduces the problem in scope to one single datum rather than a whole chain of possible plaintext copies. Key issue: you can't do any operations on encrypted data, essentially you're killing off your database. Homomorphic encryption is academic research, not something that is widely available and su…

I fully expect that we will see application level and system level tools that are compliant with the law pop up any day now, the need is certainly there.

Also, for purposes of operations on data it all depends on what the column holds. For instance, you don't actually need access to fields such as names and dates of birth if you have a client ID and that is yours, not the customers and so you could leave that field in plain text. Any operation would then need that client ID but that's workable.

You could even say that if you would need that decryption key for anything other than user or controller directed computation that you are probably doing something you shouldn't be doing. In all other cases the context is clear, consent has been obtained and the data can be decrypted if required.

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

#150

Post by jandrewrogers »

dhdhhdd wrote: post #146
holidayacct wrote: post #116

Whenever someone publishes an article like this, I want them to find out what its like when you reach the threshold of 100000 individual delete requests per second which ends up being five million actual deletes when you factor in all of the associated references to the item being deleted and its metadata. Then I want them to find out what happens when you have to propagate those deletes across geographically distrib…

If you can insert... for sure you can delete? It doesn't take days for your picture to show up. Sure, eventual consistency and replication and distributed storage is hard. Alternative approach: encrypt at rest, delete encryption key. It would require extra resources for sure, but if privacy was a concern... ;-) (and then have a reasonable expiry on your CDN if you use one). (of course then we can argue that deleting…

The cost of insert and delete is massively asymmetrical. This is an intentional and fundamental architectural decision in all of our data infrastructure and built into the data structures and algorithms that are used. Not only does “delete optimized” data infrastructure not exist, in many cases we don’t have good computer science for how you would even design such a thing while having good performance for all the other operations.

People that suggest using encryption and throwing away the key have not thought through the implications of that approach. It scales very poorly and therefore is not suitable for most practical systems. There are good reasons “obvious” solutions like this are not used.

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