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

theverge.com

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

#11

Post by robjan »

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

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.

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

#12

Post by m4tthumphrey »

jermier wrote: post #8

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.

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

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

#14

Post by rco8786 »

Some real (understandable) ignorance about how the tech industry works in this article. There should be no expectation that Instagram ever deletes anything permanently from their servers.

The bug was showing users photos that were internally marked as deleted. Not that the photos were not in fact removed from Instagrams servers.

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

#15

Post by rco8786 »

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.

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

#16

Post by shahsyed »

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 the idea behind this application was to send a message that would disappear after a variable amount of time :)

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

#17

Post by rco8786 »

searchableguy wrote: post #6

> Pokharel discovered the bug in October last year and says it was fixed earlier this month (2020, august) Shouldn't there be fines for this? Took almost an year after being reported.

A fine for what? Not fixing a minor bug in a timely fashion? That’s not a road we want to travel down.

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

#18

Post by rco8786 »

jermier wrote: post #8

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.

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

#20

Post by victords »

rco8786 wrote: post #14

Some real (understandable) ignorance about how the tech industry works in this article. There should be no expectation that Instagram ever deletes anything permanently from their servers. The bug was showing users photos that were internally marked as deleted. Not that the photos were not in fact removed from Instagrams servers.

> There should be no expectation that Instagram ever deletes anything permanently from their servers.

No, there should be this expectation. If I have a photo of myself that I'm not comfortable being saved somewhere, there should be an expectation that when I delete this from a service, that service will actually delete it.

The expectation should be that the service will do what it said, not that it hid everything very well.

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