81–90 of 93 posts
Also, I mentioned why account deletion is a non-trivial problem in this comment thread last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5976947.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Make sure you maintain control over the domain and always have a robots.txt file present, because if you ever lose that, those files will become visible again. Good luck arranging for your descendents to do this after you die.
I'm pretty certain that this isn't the case. If anything, it's the other way around - if a domain changes hands, and the new owner sets up a restrictive robots.txt, the content in the archive is made unavailable, and stays unavailable even if the robots.txt (or the whole domain) later disappears.
I work on this at Facebook and we do permanently delete your content when you delete your account. It's an interesting distributed systems problem, and we're happy with the framework we've developed for this. We're working on a blog post with more details and hope to publish that soon. Also, I mentioned why account deletion is a non-trivial problem in this comment thread last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?i…
You know, THIS facebook: http://pleasedeletefacebook.com (list of most of their history up through 2012)
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I agree with your general point but your example is not correct The Internet Archive makes it very easy to remove content from their site. I had a family web site accessible to the public for 12 years with about 25,000 pictures on it. For various reasons I took the site down but archive.org still showed the pictures. A quick change to robots.txt stopped that though. Basically, even if the archive grabbed the files at…
Make sure you maintain control over the domain and always have a robots.txt file present, because if you ever lose that, those files will become visible again. Good luck arranging for your descendents to do this after you die.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's perfectly possible and reasonable to delete all of your data. It's just hard. We have to do this with our clients if they shift off our platform and believe me, it's not much fun deleting 20-100Gb datasets from a shared database with over 2000 tables in it on production kit. But we do it, because we are honest. Facebook are dishonest. Simple as.
*Anything you post on the internet, the real, open internet, is forever* I've tried looking for stuff I posted on craigslist 5 or 6 years ago and nothing was in the wayback machine, only dead links to a few posts. Apparently the crawls of the site only went a couple/few layers deep, as well as crawls not being conducted daily, and some years had only 2 or 3 crawls for the entire year. I haven't tried searching my old…
Though it might not be generally / publicly available. Could still be on sale somewhere.
I work on this at Facebook and we do permanently delete your content when you delete your account. It's an interesting distributed systems problem, and we're happy with the framework we've developed for this. We're working on a blog post with more details and hope to publish that soon. Also, I mentioned why account deletion is a non-trivial problem in this comment thread last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?i…
Many sites use a CDN (Akamai, Limelight, Amazon's Cloudfront, etc.). The whole idea of a CDN is that it distributes content. Even if the origin goes away (your copy), the CDN may continue serving it for a long time. If someone has a specific item URL within that network, they can still access it. Working with CDN APIs to delete content (especially if, say, that content has various instances based on sizes, previews, etc.,) can be ... interesting.
And if third parties are presenting your content, they might also persist it, say as a Google preview or cache, or Archive.org, or other tools.
Even within your own systems, data can be replicated in ways which are difficult to access fully. Backups can exist which cannot be easily accessed for wiping. There are war stories of magically re-appearing data resulting from data recovery operations.
So, while it's possible to flag content as "don't present" pretty easily, actually rooting all of it out thoroughly can be a much more involved task.
Un-seeing is difficult.
Worth adding, because it's not mentioned on the linked page: When I deleted my account in 2010, there was a one month cooling off period, during which any sign-in would cancel the deletion request. Perhaps that's sensible to catch malicious/accidental deletions, but I imagine it also makes it hard for Facebook addicts to leave.
You can do this by changing your password right before you delete your FB account, as that is supposed to revoke OAuth tokens.
I work on this at Facebook and we do permanently delete your content when you delete your account. It's an interesting distributed systems problem, and we're happy with the framework we've developed for this. We're working on a blog post with more details and hope to publish that soon. Also, I mentioned why account deletion is a non-trivial problem in this comment thread last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?i…
Just to vouch, though not in Facebook's case, it is complicated. Many sites use a CDN (Akamai, Limelight, Amazon's Cloudfront, etc.). The whole idea of a CDN is that it distributes content. Even if the origin goes away (your copy), the CDN may continue serving it for a long time. If someone has a specific item URL within that network, they can still access it. Working with CDN APIs to delete content (especially if, s…