Comment by samstave
7 years ago
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.
True, but this isn't an excuse. It's slow to delete data because Facebook designed it that way. They could have designed for privacy and real-time deletion of data, but they didn't, because they didn't care.
> "They could have designed for privacy and real-time deletion of data"
Actually, they could not. If data is geo-replicated across multiple clusters, spread all over the place, divided into hot and cold storage layers - it's crystal clear you can't perform "real time deletion of data". Instantaneous deletion of all data, leaving no trace behind, can not happen under such complex constraints.
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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.
> 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.
This is true, but it's worth noting that not overwriting your own data on a machine you physically own as an optimization is very different behavior from not overwriting someone else's data on your server when they request that you delete it.
I couldn't agree more.
“Rm doesn’t work like that, so clearly it’s ok that Facebook takes 90 days to delete your data after you make the request”
Utter horse crap
If you put words into other people's mouths, you're only creating confusion for yourself. I meant what I wrote, and nothing more.
> 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).