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Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions

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Re: Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions

#71

Post by andrei_says_ »

organsnyder wrote: post #30
itvision wrote: post #6

I'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.

How does the law relate to backups? What about reports run in the past and possibly saved on someone’s local drive?

Re: Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions

#72

Post by Nextgrid »

SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #62
Nextgrid wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s imagine you’re a modern bank and associate card transactions with the merchant. Even if you sanitize/delete the account holder record, you can’t delete the transactions themselves (as it would screw up your accounting) nor the merchant association. Now let’s say you have a very particular customer that always goes to a very specific restaurant at pretty much the same time every day consistently. That pattern al…

Is this based on your interpretation of GDPR, or legal precedent?

The former - my understanding is that anything that can be used to identify a user is considered personal data, so even things that would be benign/meaningless in isolation would count if they produce a unique enough signal when aggregated.

Re: Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions

#73

Post by michaelt »

SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #62
Nextgrid wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s imagine you’re a modern bank and associate card transactions with the merchant. Even if you sanitize/delete the account holder record, you can’t delete the transactions themselves (as it would screw up your accounting) nor the merchant association. Now let’s say you have a very particular customer that always goes to a very specific restaurant at pretty much the same time every day consistently. That pattern al…

Is this based on your interpretation of GDPR, or legal precedent?

Given that 99% of GDPR stuff goes unenforced, presumably it's the former.

If you understand the GDPR exclusively based on legal precedent, you'd probably conclude the GDPR doesn't exist.

Re: Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions

#74

Post by teddyh »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #71
organsnyder wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does the law relate to backups? What about reports run in the past and possibly saved on someone’s local drive?

https://gdpr-info.eu/

Re: Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions

#75

Post by osener »

I wonder how this is supposed to work with workplace apps such as Slack, especially with regards to GDPR.

Say I am leaving my job, and want my personal information to be purged from this 3rd party service (Slack). They say [1] "Primary Owners of a workspace or org must contact Slack to request deletion of a deactivated member's profile information.". What if I contact the "Primary Owner" before leaving my job and they ignore my request, or better yet I have already left my job and I don't know how to contact them or who they are? Why can't I request my personal information to be deleted from a completely 3rd party American company's database myself?

[1] https://slack.com/help/articles/360000360443-Delete-profile-...

Re: Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions

#76

Post by Nextgrid »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #12
zero_k wrote: post #7

The company I know handles account "deletions" by pseudonymizing data, which is utter BS, any half-competent engineer can recover who the original person was. The engineering lead in charge realized he can get promoted by calling pseudonymization "anonymization" thereby fooling most, and not losing the data for the company. Those who knew he was making a mess were not included in the data deletion project, likely bec…

One reason deletion may not be technically absolute is that tombstone records may be needed to gradually cull the data from things like backups and 3P systems. Usually though these should just be surrogate keys with no human significance. Then ultimately they get purged too.

The danger with surrogate keys and pseudonymization/tokenization is that the mere patterns in the data such as foreign key relationships may be enough to uniquely identify someone.

Re: Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions

#77

Post by danielskogly »

itvision wrote: post #6

I'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.

When a user requests deletion from my wishlist service, I fully delete everything, not only to be GDPR-compliant, but because it's the right thing to do. This includes:

- Their account changes and passports

- Their own wishlists, including all items added

- Any claims they've made on other wishlists

- Any item suggestions they've added to other wishlists

- The checked status of any item suggestions they've checked on other wishlists

- Removing them as partners on collaborative wishlists created by others

- The user

I'm not sure why someone would _want_ to keep user data around, as that seems more of a liability than an asset.

Re: Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions

#78

Post by Nextgrid »

dschuetz wrote: post #61

Is it possible in Germany to file a GDPR violation against vendors who outright refuse deletion or fail to comply otherwise?

It should be possible to complain to your local data protection authority.

Whether they'll do anything tangible about it is another matter (in the UK the answer is absolutely not), and same for whether they are able to do anything tangible about it (good luck if the offender is shielded behind the crooked Irish DPA).

Re: Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions

#79

Post by Bombthecat »

organsnyder wrote: post #30
itvision wrote: post #6

I'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.

No one really checks

Source : talked with people who implemented gdpr deletion at some companies.

Re: Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions

#80

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Nextgrid wrote: post #48
tfigment wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume Apple verifies everything on the phone is removed so no cookies left behind for next app or reinstall.

I thought we were talking about server-side account delete?

It’s both. I suspect most of their focus is on data retention; regardless of where it happens.

Most times, that’s usually a server, of some kind, but it could also be something like an iCloud data account, I guess; which would be a challenge, as the data could be in many places.

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