Comment by guessmyname

We don't soft delete payloads at Raygun (https://raygun.com), for the very fact that typically if one of our customers wants to delete something it's because they might have sent something they don't want a third party to have. We have filters and other PII filtering tools etc, but it every now and then something might be sent by mistake.

Having said that, you'd be amazed how often folks ask for things to be undeleted (despite a big warning dialog).

Clearly developers pervasively believe soft deletes are occurring everywhere.

> Not to alleviate facebook of blame, but who's to say data on almost every other social media service isn't also just flagged for deletion?

The word "delete" has a pretty clear definition to most users. Facebook is one of the most used pieces of software in the world. If FB is allowed to lie to its users, it would indeed give a pass to just about every social media service out there.

The reason Facebook is special, and deserves special scrutiny, is because of its power. If FB establishes a bad behavior, it will become the norm.

Does it make it ok for Facebook to do it just because similar other companies do it? I say no, all of them should delete something I say to delete. And "everyone does it" is makes it a bigger problem, not a smaller one.

I recall the distinction being made very clear on LiveJournal between "deleted" content vs "purged". I would be very surprised if they were not being forthright about this. Of course this was 10 years ago, before the Russian ownership. So I do have reason to believe that not all companies act in deceitful ways when it comes to retention of user data.

Snapchat claims to. And after the trouble they once got into for not deleting media after it was viewed, I believe them.

https://www.snap.com/en-GB/privacy/privacy-policy/

Yeah i don't see much difference between this and hitting delete on a file in a local file system. The data itself still sits there until the sectors gets reclaimed, but there is no longer a file name or directory entry associated with them.

File systems eventually overwrite that data, though. FB's system specifically never reclaims it. Why on earth would you ever do that, unless you have absolutely no respect for your users wishes?

What video would you upload? Just nonsense? Is this to become the modern equivalent of a "black fax"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_fax

A browser addin to help with this helping might help make the world a better place.

> So I'm wondering if the services actually have some sort of archiving requirement for law enforcement purposes? Maybe for a certain number of years, they have to save your data or something like that?

Apart from a handful of specific cases like financial data, the US has no general data-retention laws. You can delete stuff aggressively as long as it's based on a consistent archival policy, not one-off deletions where you risk looking like you chose a particular thing to delete to hide evidence.

You can tell this is possible in practice by looking at how common it is to have aggressive permanent-deletion policies in corporate email, at least outside of tech. A number of big US companies automatically delete read emails in employees' inboxes after N days (with N ranging from 7 (!) to 365), unless the employee specifically takes action to refile the email into a project folder with a different per-project retention policy. The goal of those policies is to reduce companies' exposure to fishing expeditions in future lawsuits by just keeping less email around. To make that effective, the policies really do delete the emails, including from any backup systems.

Given that they have figured out how to perma-delete their own old email, I believe companies could really delete user-deleted content, perhaps after some specified period of time, if they wanted to. But unlike with their own internal emails, they don't have the same incentives to be aggressive about purging that stuff from their servers. If anything, they have the opposite incentive, to keep as much user data around indefinitely as possible.

Actually, GDPR only requires that any links from the data to the user should be destroyed, so that you can no longer figure out who created the data. This means that a lot of data will be left. And realistically I think that a lot of it will remain identifiable, just like anonymized data can be traced back to real users pretty easily if you have enough data points.

The right to request deletion of data is already mandated in current laws, GDPR doesn't change much in that regard.

The hard part is actually enforcing it, and assessing compliance.

When storage is cheap, it's rational to develop the delete flag first and think about cleanup later, which means never. The download content thing seems like a low priority project and the poor intern who probably did it didn't want to figure out how each store keeps the delete flag. At least it's honest. Would you be surprised a dd of your sd card showed your deleted photos?

Maybe they should get someone from the internal department that monitors Facebook employees to come over and show them how to run a tight ship:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/silicon-v...

If you have soft-deleted user data, then you have user data, so you had better include it.

Excellent - they'll be able to offer advertised another demographic category "People who are vocally privacy conscious, but who aren't prepared to do anything about preserving it if it means they don't get to play Farmville."

Antivirus vendors and shitty vpn services will be all over that.

Why not just every day? Only use it as much as absolutely necessary (to communicate with people you wouldn't be able to reach otherwise) and use competitors instead. Even using FB owned companies (e.g. Whatsapp) would help. While FB still gets some data, they don't get contents (unlike FB messenger all chats are end-to-end encrypted) and most importantly no ad revenues. And lower revenues is what would truly change Facebook's policies.

what is the point?

Trump has many supporters(not me). I don't think any facebook users particularly like facebook, it's just where "everyone" is.

> better than against Trump?

It is more effective to organise for a cause than against a politician. Presidents are intentionally difficult to remove. The bar for promoting action against Facebook is lower than for prompting action against the President.

Okay, don't assume people won't be interested in interesting things. Who is this general public, anyway? It's not an homogeneous group; it's made up of physicians, mechanics, teachers, lovers, Doomsday preppers, engineers, preachers, and all kinds of people who have special interests. The thing I see is that if you show them how it matters to them in their special role, rather than to them as members of this general public, they may well take an interest. Some of them may become very deeply interested indeed, if they needed such a thing but didn't know about it until you showed them!

An awful lot of people in the general public do.

Especially if their tech-savvy friends are confident they can learn about it - because it really isn't that complex - and if they understand that keypairs and trust are the basis for literally all digital security.

That doesn't mean they shouldn't.

OK. Maybe not GPG specifically.

But keypairs. Everyone should understand keypairs. They are the basis for all of digital security, and they are really not that difficult.

Yep, another way of looking at it is if it leaves your device, assume the information is eventually open to the public.

Amen. Once you upload it, you should just assume it’s out there forever. It’s probably worth assuming that virtually all anonymity can be pierced, if not now then within a decade or two.

With a few exceptions, anonymity online is ephemeral at best, subject to the motivation of the person/org trying to deanonymize you.

I used to believe Twitter was better. But once you're above a certain number of active (i.e. publicly retweeting) followers there's a pretty high chance that your tweets will end up in the feed that is used to generate the twitter stream archives:

https://archive.org/details/twitterstream?sort=-publicdate

These are tar files that contain bz2 compressed newline separated twitter events as json. These include deletion events as well, so you can for instance easily estimate the time an auto-deleter is set to.

Yes, they're huge archives, but you could still probably process a year of these for particular targets for under $10 on EC2.

Whilst I'm impressed with archive team's efforts, I would be surprised if there aren't some commercial twitter stream consumers that absolutely dwarf this.

Treat everything you put on twitter as public forever and you won't go too far wrong.

Twitter is more about finding your own social graph of people you find interesting than friends/family/coworkers like Facebook is primarily about. I could have a completely anonymous persona on Twitter and get all the same content. I could use a fake name on Facebook but it wouldn't make as much sense, and I could be reverse engineered with some accuracy from just my social graph. Your family is going to tag you as family, etc. The other non family and friends content on Facebook is more watered down than on Twitter and Facebook wouldn't be worth using for that alone.

"That made me realize that there are probably many people out there who think their files are safe as long as their Windows password isn't compromised even if the disc is not encrypted."

Of course they assume it. Partly also because windows tells you, if you loose your password, you can no longer access your account, which is bs and they know it and tell you only for "felt Security".

And encryption ... What is that?

Your view is well represented on the Internet, and is perhaps most aptly exemplified by the early jargon word “luser”, and the BOFH phenomenon. I have never, I think, really been prone to such thinking. I have never had a problem talking to ordinary people or users, or felt the immense frustration which many people have vividly described. (Note: I am a sysadmin with approximately 20 years of professional experience, and have always had a user-facing role as at least a part of my job.)

It reminds me where in Zen Buddhism, there are those who become enlightened and go off to do their own thing, and those who become enlightened and stay in the world with the rest of the ordinary unenlightened people. In the words of Alan Watts:

The understanding of Zen, the understanding of awakening, the understanding of– Well, we’ll call it mystical experiences, one of the most dangerous things in the world. And for a person who cannot contain it, it’s like putting a million volts through your electric shaver. You blow your mind and it stays blown. Now, if you go off in that way, that is what would be called in Buddhism a pratyeka- buddha—“private buddha”. He is one who goes off into the transcendental world and is never seen again. And he’s made a mistake from the standpoint of Buddhism, because from the standpoint of Buddhism, there is no fundamental difference between the transcendental world and this everyday world. The bodhisattva, you see, who doesn’t go off into a nirvana and stay there forever and ever, but comes back and lives ordinary everyday life to help other beings to see through it, too, he doesn’t come back because he feels he has some solemn duty to help mankind and all that kind of pious cant. He comes back because he sees the two worlds are the same. He sees all other beings as buddhas. He sees them, to use a phrase of G.K. Chesterton’s, “but now a great thing in the street, seems any human nod, where move in strange democracies a million masks of god.”

— Alan Watts, Lecture on Zen

Deletion by flag is very common in IT and presumably has been since the first undelete program was created. It's not a Facebook thing.

Some mail programs for a long time have had a soft-delete that requires an expunging process to create compete removal.

In an IT setting you can delete a blob from a db, but it might still be on disk, and it will still be in caches, on user machines, and in backups/archives.

FB is/was regularly audited by Irish DPC, I think one of the topics was user data deletion. I think that the results were public.