It’s software not magic. We focus on the happy path … there is rarely maligned intent here it’s just a matter of focus… I’d say if gdpr did any good it was in forcing many to be like fine we’ll devote resources to deleting data we’d otherwise probably only brother to if our db size became too big to deal with… it’s the build big and sell to someone else to deal with problem … we just don’t focus on the negative less fun problems
Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions
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Re: Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions
#22The app I'm writing does this very well.
That's because Apple requires it. They won't approve my app, unless there's a "full-fat delete" option.
If a user of the app deletes, it completely nukes their entire account, down to the last byte.
Re: Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions
#23I've worked for several companies and let me tell you the truth: * accounts are never deleted, period * At most there's a column in the table which specifies whether the account is alive or not. That's it.
Confluence even explicitly does this - you can do a “gdpr delete” which disables the user and replaces all info with random strings. It’s kind of hilarious.
I remember a service that I used 10 years ago that would do something like that. You would request to delete your account but it wouldn't work well as you stayed logged in; if you looked at your account panel most of your info was changed to random strings, including your email.
Re: Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions
#24The app I'm writing does this very well. That's because Apple requires it. They won't approve my app, unless there's a "full-fat delete" option. If a user of the app deletes, it completely nukes their entire account, down to the last byte.
Depending on the service, it's not always possible, or even desirable, to fully delete an account. For example, if something has an important social part to it, do you also delete the comments that user has left on other people's content? Or their messages in chats? If you do, then discussions end up broken. If you don't, this isn't really a "full deletion". Most social services I've seen do the latter. Some replace the name with "deleted user".
Re: Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions
#25Many companies just as some bodyguards to the login email
Re: Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions
#26The app I'm writing does this very well. That's because Apple requires it. They won't approve my app, unless there's a "full-fat delete" option. If a user of the app deletes, it completely nukes their entire account, down to the last byte.
Depending on the service, it's not always possible, or even desirable, to fully delete an account. For example, if something has an important social part to it, do you also delete the comments that user has left on other people's content? Or their messages in chats? If you do, then discussions end up broken. If you don't, this isn't really a "full deletion". Most social services I've seen do the latter. Some replace…
I’d have to look at what Apple requires, but I think deleting comments is good (maybe replacing them with a slug). That’s considered heresy, though, by today’s “data is money” crowd.
I have seen apps that delete an entire thread, when a root comment is deleted; including responses by other people. I think SMF did that.
In the case of our app, we leave communication between users to other apps (like Mail and Messages), so we sidestep that problem.
Actually, the reason we deliberately push communication out to other apps, is so we’re not on the hook for it. There’s no reason for us to have the users communicating with each other, via our app. Long story, but privacy is a real big deal, with our user base. I’m super tinfoil about security.
Re: Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions
#27Part of this is leftover tech culture from Facebook's early focus on Growth, Growth, and more Growth. Allowing for easy deletion of accounts was fundamentally at odds with user growth. It's refreshing to see that tech is now heading in a more socially responsible direction, but the industry still has a long way to go.
> It's refreshing to see that tech is now heading in a more socially responsible direction what are examples of tech heading in a more socially responsible direction?
Datacenter carbon neutrality and de-biasing ML models are two that I can recall off the top of my head.
These are, of course, unrelated to account deletion, but it shows that big tech is at the very minimum aware that social responsibility is becoming a more important part of business.
Re: Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's refreshing to see that tech is now heading in a more socially responsible direction what are examples of tech heading in a more socially responsible direction?
Datacenter carbon neutrality and de-biasing ML models are two that I can recall off the top of my head. These are, of course, unrelated to account deletion, but it shows that big tech is at the very minimum aware that social responsibility is becoming a more important part of business.
> de-biasing ML models
As exemplified by, for example, Google firing the two heads of their Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team...who had been researching bias? [1]
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/13/22370158/google-ai-ethics...
Re: Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions
#29> 2 services moved my account to a different email address instead of deleting it. I was only able to detect this because they changed the mailbox part (the bit in front of the @ sign) but left the domain unchanged. I capture all incoming emails to my domain, so I saw email-change confirmation emails and other emails arriving at the new unexpected addresses.
That's sketchy, especially if you don't own the domain but you're on a multi tenant domain like Gmail
Re: Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions
#30I've worked for several companies and let me tell you the truth: * accounts are never deleted, period * At most there's a column in the table which specifies whether the account is alive or not. That's it.
That's illegal under the GDPR and many other privacy laws and is subject to heavy fines if caught. I work in privacy at a large tech company, and we take this stuff extremely seriously.