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Instead of deleting account, NYT appends ‘1000’ to username and email address

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Re: Instead of deleting account, NYT appends ‘1000’ to username and email address

#101

Post by lostapathy »

perl4ever wrote: post #70
DevX101 wrote: post #64

Doing real deletes on user accounts is a surprisingly challenging problem and I'd be willing to bet very few companies do real deletes where all of your data is wiped permanently from the company. For legal and financial reasons, companies often need to keep track of historical user activity. If a company states in their investor quarterly report that they had 1M active users, they better be able to prove it in an au…

I used to work where (not a service for the general public) there was an "is deleted" flag for everything, but every now and then a client would insist that data be really deleted, and depending on who it was and how they asked, we might go and do it, which was a huge hassle and would cause no end of problems down the line. On the other hand, "is deleted" flags end up causing issues when you forget to put "where not…

The discard gem for rails has put a lot of thought into this and works pretty well, all things considered.

It's not perfect, but I find using a library (either directly for inspiration) is often a shortcut to learning about a lot of edge cases from doing your own things.

https://github.com/jhawthorn/discard

Re: Instead of deleting account, NYT appends ‘1000’ to username and email address

#102

Post by lostapathy »

DevX101 wrote: post #98
pinusc wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always hard delete all the data _and_ keep track of deleted users so that their usernames can't be reused. Once you have hard delete, this solution is almost trivial and by far the most user-valuable.

> keep track of deleted users so that their usernames can't be reused This seems to violate GPDR, no? Attacker attempts to create an account (say: victim@gmail.com) on AshleyMadison and is prevented because the server tracked past users. Attacker could them demonstrate victim@gmail.com was at one point a user on AshleyMadison.com

Verifying the email keeps someone from hijacking the account without leaking that an account formerly existed. At least so long as their email isn't also compromised - in which case they have bigger problems.

Re: Instead of deleting account, NYT appends ‘1000’ to username and email address

#103

Post by asdff »

jahlove wrote: post #60
OutsmartDan wrote: post #23

NYT is notoriously the worst at customer service and account handling. I tried to get a previous invoice from them previously and after 1 week of calling customer support and being passed around, I still wasn't able to get it.

Honestly, the stories i've ready about how difficult it is to cancel your NYT account are a contributing factor to why I don't subscribe. I love NYT, but if it's not as easy to cancel as it is to sign up then count me out.

I just subscribe to the local paper (LA times) and get my national coverage from their reporting. By the time you subscribe to the wapo, nyt, economist, wsj, atlantic, you are paying a huge sum a year on redundant coverage. Better to focus on local issues that are more likely to affect my life than the national soap opera anyway.

Re: Instead of deleting account, NYT appends ‘1000’ to username and email address

#104

Post by hanniabu »

anticensor wrote: post #46
the-dude wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In The Netherlands there are legal requirements for invoices.

US has too, they are lower but not nonexistent. Blank invoice is not a valid invoice in the states either.

I'm ashamed I'm finding out about this through an HN comment. Would you happen to have a good source to read?

Re: Instead of deleting account, NYT appends ‘1000’ to username and email address

#105

Post by ars »

DevX101 wrote: post #64

Doing real deletes on user accounts is a surprisingly challenging problem and I'd be willing to bet very few companies do real deletes where all of your data is wiped permanently from the company. For legal and financial reasons, companies often need to keep track of historical user activity. If a company states in their investor quarterly report that they had 1M active users, they better be able to prove it in an au…

Another option is to add an "archive" table, where deleted records are moved to that table.

It can get complex (for example foreign keys need special handling).

One option is table partitioning: https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/blog/postgresql-12-foreign-ke...

You partition the table based on deleted or not, and then query either both tables together, or just the active table.

Re: Instead of deleting account, NYT appends ‘1000’ to username and email address

#106

Post by [deleted] »

hinkley wrote: post #90
DevX101 wrote: post #64

Doing real deletes on user accounts is a surprisingly challenging problem and I'd be willing to bet very few companies do real deletes where all of your data is wiped permanently from the company. For legal and financial reasons, companies often need to keep track of historical user activity. If a company states in their investor quarterly report that they had 1M active users, they better be able to prove it in an au…

And something I had to learn the hard way and then teach quite a few people is that hard deletes don’t just turn your tables into Swiss cheese, they also can cause table scans. When you delete a row, every inbound foreign key constraint has to be checked to look for any rows that refer to the deleted row, and most likely you didn’t set up an index for the foreign key, so now you have a table scan. Possibly several. I…

[deleted]

Re: Instead of deleting account, NYT appends ‘1000’ to username and email address

#107

Post by jackcosgrove »

ars wrote: post #105
DevX101 wrote: post #64

Doing real deletes on user accounts is a surprisingly challenging problem and I'd be willing to bet very few companies do real deletes where all of your data is wiped permanently from the company. For legal and financial reasons, companies often need to keep track of historical user activity. If a company states in their investor quarterly report that they had 1M active users, they better be able to prove it in an au…

Another option is to add an "archive" table, where deleted records are moved to that table. It can get complex (for example foreign keys need special handling). One option is table partitioning: https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/blog/postgresql-12-foreign-ke... You partition the table based on deleted or not, and then query either both tables together, or just the active table.

Partitioning sounds like a great solution, thank you for this.

Re: Instead of deleting account, NYT appends ‘1000’ to username and email address

#108

Post by jackcosgrove »

DevX101 wrote: post #93
vincvinc wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soft deletion violates the GDPR. Read article 17: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/ And previous HN discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16366050

Did a glance through that thread and it didn't seem like there was a strong consensus on how to respect GPDR while maintaining historical data for reporting purposes. Any best practices?

Having worked in a HIPAA regulated space, I can say that hashing the username, such as the email address, for login purposes can allow for account recovery if the credentials are retained. At the same time the cleartext username and other PII can be stored in an object that is both encrypted at rest for its lifetime, and on top of that has its sensitive fields overwritten upon logical deletion. Account recovery cannot recover non-credential derived PII but that is a small annoyance to the user in order to be compliant and trustworthy. The internal user ID should be used throughout downstream reporting rather than actual PII for the sake of continuity and privacy.

Re: Instead of deleting account, NYT appends ‘1000’ to username and email address

#109

Post by kube-system »

true_religion wrote: post #78
mesozoic wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure that breaches GDPR and maybe CCPA. Maybe they can get away with anonomyzing the data but that doesn't sound like what is being done.

Sure, but a local paper like the New York Times is hardly subject to the laws of the EU, so GDPR doesn’t apply.

The EU says that GDPR applies globally.

Some violators might successfully keep their assets out of the reach of EU enforcement, but that's going to be really tough to do for any large business with global operations.

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