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Comment by abound

8 days ago

Wouldn't a hash work great for this purpose? I.e.

1. User requests for email alice@example.com to be removed from database

2. Company removes "alice@example.com" from 'emails' table

3. Company adds 00b7d3...eff98f to 'do_not_send' table

Later on, the company buys emails from some other third-party, and Alice's email is on that list. The company can hash all the email addresses they received, and remove the emails with hashes that appear in their 'do_not_send' table.

You'd have to normalize the emails (and salt the hashes), but seems doable?

So in the end, they have a list of emails that match the hashes in their blacklist? What's the point?

  • Any entry that matches a hash needs to be deleted. The point is presumably to minimize the retention of PII.