Comment by kerkeslager
7 years ago
Secretly? Secretly from whom?
There is nothing I've come across, ever, that has lead me to believe that Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc., ever delete anything, ever. Not even to clean up space as some people on this thread are suggesting. Hard drive space is cheap and data is valuable. This isn't a secret, this is a fairly obvious business practice that all the big players, and most competent small players, are engaging in.
FWIW, Facebook does say that they will delete all of your data within 90 days of account deletion. I believe that indicates that they've put the engineering effort to do a full audit of data to be deleted, handle missing references across the product, and to fully delete user data from logs and backups.
From https://www.facebook.com/help/250563911970368 :
> When you delete your account, people won't be able to see it on Facebook. It may take up to 90 days from the beginning of the deletion process to delete all of the things you've posted, like your photos, status updates or other data stored in backup systems.
The case from the article is trickier. My impression is the feature was just implemented with an append-only data model, which is often (maybe usually) a good engineering decision. "Secretly" from the article title feels disingenuous because Facebook never said it was deleted. As an engineer, it's frustrating that I might have to write my software to be more fragile to match the implicit expectations of how a non-technical user thinks software should work. But the frustration on the user's end is also plenty understandable here. Hopefully the gap can be closed a little on both sides by a combination of educating users and being more privacy-conscious in engineering and business decisions.
Fucking stupid policy - so they have 90 days to off load your shit to Utah/gov-cloud before they “delete” your data?
Who can possibly believe this BS.
Imagine you wanted to delete data of your own Sustem - but when you hit rm it takes 90 days to execute - this sentiment PISSES me off.
When I say “delete me from your service now” I have a reasonable expectation that you will delete it.
C’mon
Do you think it's as easy as "rm"-ing a file away? Your data is kept internally in a multitude of different databases. Parts of it sitting in cold storage. Log files, caches. That data is split across thousands of different nodes. Each system has different data retention policies. Some databases don't permit removal of a specific record - the records must "expire" first. It really does take time to delete data.
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It's interesting that you think they need those 90 days to off load your data. As if they hadn't done so before your deletion.
By the way, rm does work like that. The file will just be marked as deleted (by removing its entry from the filesystem index), but will remain on your disk for some time afterwards, from some minutes to months. If you want to ensure deletion, you should be using shred.
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> Fucking stupid policy - so they have 90 days to off load your shit to Utah/gov-cloud before they “delete” your data?
FWIW I would be surprised if there is not a delay when deleting from S3/Azure Storage/GCS (and thus anything that uses those services).
Google deletes your data within I think 64 days if you request them to or delete your account.
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/32046
There's nothing there which clarifies that "delete" isn't a euphemism for "flag it to no longer be displayed to users" like it is everywhere else where companies collect data on users, so you'll excuse my skepticism.
Exactly and they have the perfect excuse:
"Well when talking about deleting we mean we do the exact same thing the file system does to a file, it flags it, but doesn't actually erase it's content. Acting like a filesystem delete operation is what people expect when using that word"
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Clearly there is a big disconnect here. It seems somebody is suggesting there should be a correlation between a user removing content from their account and Facebook destroying some of Facebook property.
Anything submitted to Facebook is the property of Facebook. Users have no business telling Facebook to destroy Facebook property.
Facebook disagrees: "You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook"
https://www.facebook.com/terms.php
It also says you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License).
This link addresses your concerns by clarifying a prior form of the above mentioned policy: http://legalteamusa.net/tacticalip/2013/02/11/does-facebook-...
I suspect the Facebook IP Policy is a standard blanket of legal compliance if the following is that policy: https://www.facebook.com/help/intellectual_property
In short Facebook can do anything they want with the IP content you provide to them. It also identifies, by example, IP content as media you provide to them. For that material the policy is pretty clear, but what about other material? What about textual content that is typed into Facebook and identified relationships? It seems this information is covered by the same policies and is IP subject to Facebook's use.
My understanding of Facebook policy is also likely dated as their terms change periodically. The current policy is dated at 30 January 2015.
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> Anything submitted to Facebook is the property of Facebook.
I'm not sure how you came to this conclusion.
Are we to accept that this is how it works simply because Facebook says this is how it works?
You accept that when you join.
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Facebook's terms of services agreement that you must consent to in order to open or maintain your account. These are the rules not because Facebook says so, but because you say so when you agree to their terms.
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>Secretly from whom?
The vast majority of users.